short-paper

Towards understanding code readability and its impact on design quality

Authors:

Umme Ayda Mannan,

Iftekhar Ahmed,

Anita SarmaAuthors Info & Claims

NL4SE 2018: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on NLP for Software Engineering

Pages 18 - 21

https://doi.org/10.1145/3283812.3283820

Published: 04 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Readability of code is commonly believed to impact the overall quality of software. Poor readability not only hinders developers from understanding what the code is doing but also can cause developers to make sub-optimal changes and introduce bugs. Developers also recognize this risk and state readability among their top information needs. Researchers have modeled readability scores. However, thus far, no one has investigated how readability evolves over time and how that impacts design quality of software. We perform a large scale study of 49 open source Java projects, spanning 8296 commits and 1766 files. We find that readability is high in open source projects and does not fluctuate over project’s lifetime unlike design quality of a project. Also readability has a non-significant correlation of 0.151 (Kendall’s τ ) with code smell count (indicator of design quality). Since current readability measure is unable to capture the increased difficulty in reading code due to the degraded design quality, our results hint towards the need of a better measurement and modeling of code readability.

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Cited By

Eom HKim DLim SKoo HHwang S(2024)R2I: A Relative Readability Metric for Decompiled CodeProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36437441:FSE(383-405)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643744
Park KJohnson JPeterson CYedla NBaysinger IAponte JSharif B(2024)An eye tracking study assessing source code readability rules for program comprehensionEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10532-x29:6Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10532-x
Alami APardo RLinåker J(2024)Free open source communities sustainability: Does it make a difference in software quality?Empirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10529-629:5Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10529-6
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Index Terms

Towards understanding code readability and its impact on design quality
1. Software and its engineering

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cover image ACM Conferences

NL4SE 2018: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on NLP for Software Engineering

November 2018

41 pages

ISBN:9781450360555

DOI:10.1145/3283812

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 November 2018

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ESEC/FSE '18: 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 4, 2018

FL, Lake Buena Vista, USA

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Cited By

Eom HKim DLim SKoo HHwang S(2024)R2I: A Relative Readability Metric for Decompiled CodeProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36437441:FSE(383-405)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643744
Park KJohnson JPeterson CYedla NBaysinger IAponte JSharif B(2024)An eye tracking study assessing source code readability rules for program comprehensionEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10532-x29:6Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10532-x
Alami APardo RLinåker J(2024)Free open source communities sustainability: Does it make a difference in software quality?Empirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10529-629:5Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10529-6
Rio AAbreu FMendes D(2024)Causal inference of server- and client-side code smells in web apps evolutionEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10478-029:5Online publication date: 5-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-024-10478-0
Mi QZhan YWeng HBao QCui LMa W(2023)A graph-based code representation method to improve code readability classificationEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10319-628:4Online publication date: 23-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10319-6
Revina AAksu ÜMeister V(2021)Method to Address Complexity in Organizations Based on a Comprehensive OverviewInformation10.3390/info1210042312:10(423)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/info12100423
Karanikiotis TPapamichail MSymeonidis A(2021)Multilevel Readability Interpretation Against Software Properties: A Data-Centric ApproachSoftware Technologies10.1007/978-3-030-83007-6_10(203-226)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83007-6_10

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