Abstract
Comments are used to explain the meaning of code and ease communications between programmers themselves, quality assurance auditors, and code reviewers. A tool has been developed to help programmers write readable comments and measure their readability level. It is used to enhance software readability by providing alternatives to both keywords and comment statements from a local database and an online dictionary. It is also a word-finding query engine for developers. Readability level is measured using three different formulas: the fog index, the Flesch reading ease score, and Flesch–Kincaid grade levels. A questionnaire has been distributed to 42 programmers and 35 students to compare the readability aspect between both new comments written by the tool and the original comments written by previous programmers and developers. Programmers stated that the comments from the proposed tool had fewer complex words and took less time to read and understand. Nevertheless, this did not significantly affect the understandability of the text, as programmers normally have quite a high level of English. However, the results from students show that the tool affects the understandability of text and the time taken to read it, while text complexity results show that the tool makes new comment text that is more readable by changing the three studied variables.
Highlights
Code writing, when developing a software life cycle, is considered an important phase
Researchers noted that it takes a long time to understand the code after or while developing compared with other software maintenance activities [1,2] and that source code readability and documentation readability are both critical to the maintainability of a project
CRS “comments readability system” as a tool to be used by programmers to verify the readability of their comments in the development phase and suggest improvements to enhance the comments readability level to be more understandable and valuable to anyone who will be in process of using this code
Summary
Code writing, when developing a software life cycle, is considered an important phase. Researchers noted that it takes a long time to understand the code after or while developing compared with other software maintenance activities [1,2] and that source code readability and documentation readability are both critical to the maintainability of a project. Among the factors that affect this are comments, which are defined as embedded documents and useful artifacts related to code quality [2,3]. The existence of these comments is necessary for program comprehension, especially when the maintainers differ from the programmers or main developers. Comments were involved in about 15–20% of Mozilla source code [2]
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