Improving Software Quality through the Development of Code Readability

Abstract: In this paper we present the role of software readability on software development cost. We dispute that the upfront cost of incorporating software readability pays off attractively at later stages in the life cycle, especially at the maintenance phase which is where most of the life cycle cost of software is expended. We explore the concept of code readability and investigate its relation to software quality. We build an automated readability measure and show that it can be 75 percent effective and better than a human, on average, at predicting readability judgments. We also measure the snippets on over million lines of code, as well as longitudinally, over many releases of selected projects. At last, we discuss the suggestions of this study on Programming language design and engineering practice.

Keywords: snippets, Annotator, software engineering, code readability, software quality