Related papers: Evaluating Code Readability and Legibility: An Exa…

Automatic readability assessment plays a key role in ensuring effective and accessible written communication. Despite significant progress, the field is hindered by inconsistent definitions of readability and measurements that rely on…

Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…

Proponents of software verification have argued that simpler code is easier to verify: that is, that verification tools issue fewer false positives and require less human intervention when analyzing simpler code. We empirically validate…

Code readability is one of the main aspects of code quality, influenced by various properties like identifier names, comments, code structure, and adherence to standards. However, measuring this attribute poses challenges in both industry…

Code review is a widely-used practice in software development companies to identify defects. Hence, code review has been included in many software engineering curricula at universities worldwide. However, teaching code review is still a…

Code readability is crucial for software comprehension and maintenance, yet difficult to assess at scale. Traditional static metrics often fail to capture the subjective, context-sensitive nature of human judgments. Large Language Models…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated code refactoring tasks. Although these models can quickly refactor code, the quality may exhibit inconsistencies and unpredictable behavior. In this article, we systematically…

The increasing adoption of machine learning tools has led to calls for accountability via model interpretability. But what does it mean for a machine learning model to be interpretable by humans, and how can this be assessed? We focus on…

Recently, workforce shortage has become a popular issue in information technology (IT). One solution to increasing the workforce supply is to increase the number of female IT professionals. This is because there is gender imbalance in…

Some approaches to increasing program reliability involve a disciplined use of programming languages so as to minimise the hazards introduced by error-prone features. This is realised by writing code that is constrained to a subset of the a…

Methods for scoring text readability have been studied for over a century, and are widely used in research and in user-facing applications in many domains. Thus far, the development and evaluation of such methods have primarily relied on…

Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…

Various programming tools, languages, and environments give programmers the impression of changing a program while it is running. This experience of liveness has been discussed for over two decades and a broad spectrum of research on this…

Background: Despite similar education and background, programmers can exhibit vast differences in efficacy. While research has identified some potential factors, such as programming experience and domain knowledge, the effect of these…

Code readability is an important indicator of software maintenance as it can significantly impact maintenance efforts. Recently, LLM (large language models) have been utilized for code readability evaluation. However, readability evaluation…

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…

Despite the popularity and importance of modern code review, the understanding of the cognitive processes that enable reviewers to analyze code and provide meaningful feedback is lacking. To address this gap, we observed and interviewed ten…

Automatically predicting how difficult it is for humans to understand a code snippet can assist developers in tasks like deciding when and where to refactor. Despite many proposed code comprehensibility metrics, studies have shown they…

Teaching the software engineers of the future to write high-quality code with good style and structure is important. This systematic literature review identifies existing instructional approaches, their objectives, and the strategies used…

Program comprehension concerns the ability of an individual to make an understanding of an existing software system to extend or transform it. Software systems comprise of data that are noisy and missing, which makes program understanding…