Measuring the Extent of Source Code Readability Using Regression Analysis

Abstract

Software maintenance accounts for a large portion of the software life cycle cost. In the software maintenance phase, comprehending the legacy source code is inevitable, which takes most of the time. Source code readability is a metric of the extent of source code comprehension. The better the code is readable, the easier it is for code readers to comprehend the system based on the source code. This paper proposes an enhanced source code readability metric to quantitative measure the extent of code readability, which is more enhanced measurement method than previous research that dichotomously judges whether the source code was readable or not. As an evaluation, we carried out a survey and analyzed them with two-way linear regression analysis to measure the extent of source code readability.