An Empirical Study Assessing Source Code Readability in Comprehension

Abstract

Software developers spend a significant amount of time reading source code. If code is not written with readability in mind, it impacts the time required to maintain it. In order to alleviate the time taken to read and understand code, it is important to consider how readable the code is. The general consensus is that source code should be written to minimize the time it takes for others to read and understand it. In this paper, we conduct a controlled experiment to assess two code readability rules: nesting and looping. We test 32 Java methods in four categories: ones that follow/do not follow the readability rule and that are correct/incorrect. The study was conducted online with 275 participants. The results indicate that minimizing nesting decreases the time a developer spends reading and understanding source code, increases confidence about the developer's understanding of the code, and also suggests that it improves their ability to find bugs. The results also show that avoiding the do-while statement had no significant impact on level of understanding, time spent reading and understanding, confidence in understanding, or ease of finding bugs. It was also found that the better knowledge of English a participant had, the more their readability and comprehension confidence ratings were affected by the minimize nesting rule. We discuss the implications of these findings for code readability and comprehension.