Related papers: The Mind Is a Powerful Place: How Showing Code Com…
In code comprehension experiments, participants are usually told at the beginning what kind of code comprehension task to expect. Describing experiment scenarios and experimental tasks will influence participants in ways that are sometimes…
Background: Developers spend a lot of their time on understanding source code. Static code analysis tools can draw attention to code that is difficult for developers to understand. However, most of the findings are based on non-validated…
Software developers and maintainers need to read and understand source programs and other software artifacts. The increase in size and complexity of software drastically affects several quality attributes, especially understandability and…
Context: Developers spend most of their time comprehending source code during software development. Automatically assessing how readable and understandable source code is can provide various benefits in different tasks, such as task…
Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…
Code search engines usually use readability feature to rank code snippets. There are several metrics to calculate this feature, but developers may have different perceptions about readability. Correlation between readability and…
Context: In the realm of software development, maintaining high software quality is a persistent challenge. However, this challenge is often impeded by the lack of comprehensive understanding of how specific code modifications influence…
It is well-known, and often a topic of heated debates, that programs in some programming languages are more concise than in others. This is a relevant factor when comparing or aggregating volume-impacted metrics on source code written in a…
Software metrics offer a quantitative basis for predicting the software development process. In this way, software quality can be improved very easily. Software quality should be achieved to satisfy the customer with decreasing the software…
Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…
CONTEXT: The role of expert judgement is essential in our quest to improve software project planning and execution. However, its accuracy is dependent on many factors, not least the avoidance of judgement biases, such as the anchoring bias,…
Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how…
Software code quality is a construct with three dimensions: maintainability, reliability, and functionality. Although many firms have incorporated code quality metrics in their operations, evaluating these metrics still lacks consistent…
The relevance of code comprehension in a developer's daily work was recognized more than 40 years ago. Consequently, many experiments were conducted to find out how developers could be supported during code comprehension and which code…
Literature and intuition suggest that a developer's intelligence and personality have an impact on their performance in comprehending source code. Researchers made this suggestion in the past when discussing threats to validity of their…
Testing plays an important role in securing the success of a software development project. Prior studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of applying acceptance testing within a Behavioural-Driven Development method. In this research,…
Well structured and readable source code is a pre-requisite for maintainable software and successful collaboration among developers. Static analysis enables the automated extraction of code complexity and readability metrics which can be…
Code metrics are easy to define, but not so easy to justify. It is hard to prove that a metric is valid, i.e., that measured numerical values imply anything on the vaguely defined, yet crucial software properties such as complexity and…
Context: Various approaches aim to support program comprehension by automatically detecting algorithms in source code. However, no empirical evaluations of their helpfulness have been performed. Objective: To empirically evaluate how…
Context. Source code refactoring is a well-established approach to improving source code quality without compromising its external behavior. Motivation. The literature described the benefits of refactoring, yet its application in practice…