Abstract
Quality can never be an accident and therefore, software engineers are paying immense attention to produce quality software product. Source code readability is one of those important factors that play a vital role in producing quality software. The code readability is an internal quality attribute that directly affects the future maintenance of the software and re-usability of same code in similar other projects. Literature shows that readability does not just rely on programmer’s ability to write tidy code but it also depends on programming language’s syntax. Syntax is the most visible part of any programming language that directly influence the readability of its code. If readability is a major factor for a given project, the programmers should know about the language that they shall choose to achieve the required level of quality. For this we compare the readability of three most popular high-level programming languages; Java, C#, and C++. We propose a comprehensive framework for readability comparison among these languages. The comparison has been performed on the basis of certain readability parameters that are referenced in the literature. We have also implemented an analysis tool and performed extensive experiments that produced interesting results. Furthermore, to judge the effectiveness of these results, we have performed statistical analysis using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) tool. We have chosen the Spearman’s correlation ad Mann Whitney’s T-test for the same. The results show that among all three languages, Java has the most readable code. Programmers should use Java in the projects that have code readability as a significant quality requirement.
Highlights
Software engineering is different in nature as compared to other engineering domains
In order to apply the above mentioned metrics on the code snippets, we have developed a source code readability tool (SCRT)
SCRT calculates the vocabulary of code, size, volume efforts, errors, testing time and difficulty of the code for all the programs. After calculating these different metrics we have presented the results in upcoming tables including Table III, Table IV, and Table V for Java, C#, and C++, respectively
Summary
Software engineering is different in nature as compared to other engineering domains. Software go through several updates after the first version due to some reasons; a feature was not implemented that was required, a feature was incorrectly implemented, or a new feature is required Readability means the ability to read documentation and source code [10]. Research shows that the maintainability of a software is measured by the readability and understand-ability of code. The project manager should select a programming language, which is suitable for project’s functional requirements but should offer required level of readability This selection is vital because the correct selection will positively affect the quality of the software.
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