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Beauty and the Beast: on the readability of object-oriented example programs

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Abstract

Some solutions to a programming problem are more elegant or more simple than others and thus more understandable for students. We review desirable properties of example programs from a cognitive and a measurement point of view. Certain cognitive aspects of example programs are captured by common software measures, but they are not sufficient to capture a key aspect of understandability: readability. We propose and discuss a simple readability measure for software, SRES, and apply it to object-oriented textbook examples. Our results show that readability measures correlate well with human perceptions of quality. Compared with other readability measures, SRES is less sensitive to commenting and whitespace. These results also have implications for software maintainability measures.

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Notes

  1. According to Fowler (1999), a code smell is an indication on the code’s surface level of a potential problem at a deeper level. It is subtle and easy to spot, but not necessarily an actual problem or defect.

  2. DuBay (2004) defines readability as “what makes some texts easier to read than others. It is often confused with legibility, which concerns typeface and layout.”

  3. http://www.virtualmachinery.com/jhawkprod.htm.

  4. Pogje as well (Abbas 2010) can be downloaded from http://www.bth.se/com/jub.nsf.

  5. Available from http://www.arrestedcomputing.com/readability/.

  6. Available from https://github.com/darylposnett/readability.

  7. A list of references to the source code of E1..E26 can be downloaded from http://www.bth.se/com/jub.nsf.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden

    Jürgen Börstler

  2. Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Michael E. Caspersen

  3. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Marie Nordström

Authors
  1. Jürgen Börstler
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  2. Michael E. Caspersen
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  3. Marie Nordström
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jürgen Börstler.

Appendix: Measurement results

Appendix: Measurement results

Table 6 Measurement results for the Beauty, the Beast and the example programs E1..E26 from (Börstler et al. 2011)
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Börstler, J., Caspersen, M.E. & Nordström, M. Beauty and the Beast: on the readability of object-oriented example programs. Software Qual J 24, 231–246 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-015-9267-5

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