Planned maintenance
A system upgrade is planned for 10/12-2024, at 12:00-13:00. During this time DiVA will be unavailable.
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
The Role of Method Chains and Comments in Software Readability and Comprehension – An Experiment
Blekinge Institute of Technology, Faculty of Computing, Department of Software Engineering. (SERL-Sweden)ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0639-4234
2016 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, ISSN 0098-5589, E-ISSN 1939-3520, Vol. 42, no 9, p. 886-898Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Software readability and comprehension are important factors in software maintenance. There is a large body of research on software measurement, but the actual factors that make software easier to read or easier to comprehend are not well understood. In the present study, we investigate the role of method chains and code comments in software readability and comprehension. Our analysis comprises data from 104 students with varying programming experience. Readability and comprehension were measured by perceived readability, reading time and performance on a simple cloze test. Regarding perceived readability, our results show statistically significant differences between comment variants, but not between method chain variants. Regarding comprehension, there are no significant differences between method chain or comment variants. Student groups with low and high experience, respectively, show significant differences in perceived readability and performance on the cloze tests. Our results do not show any significant relationships between perceived readability and the other measures taken in the present study. Perceived readability might therefore be insufficient as the sole measure of software readability or comprehension. We also did not find any statistically significant relationships between size and perceived readability, reading time and comprehension.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE Computer Society, 2016. Vol. 42, no 9, p. 886-898
Keywords [en]
Software readability, software comprehension, software measurement, comments, method chains, experiment
National Category
Software Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:bth-11730DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2016.2527791ISI: 000384666100005OAI: oai:DiVA.org:bth-11730DiVA, id: diva2:912345
Available from: 2016-03-16 Created: 2016-03-16 Last updated: 2018-01-10Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

fulltext(2081 kB)702 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 2081 kBChecksum SHA-512
59a3fd1fea5c126a2bbb30c1ff15342394c005a38f0b7df88a909c2fcf79ba097ed955be228a2c041f4b7524ae423d2df5db617e07bef7eee30f0f8c1617cd28
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

Other links

Publisher's full text

Authority records

Börstler, Jürgen

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Börstler, Jürgen
By organisation
Department of Software Engineering
In the same journal
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Software Engineering

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
Total: 703 downloads
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

doi
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

doi
urn-nbn
Total: 948 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf