A Model to Detect Readability Improvements in Incremental Changes
Identifying source code that has poor readability allows developers to focus maintenance efforts on problematic code. Therefore, the effort to develop models that can quantify the readability of a piece of source code has been an area of interest for software engineering researchers for several years. However, recent research questions the usefulness of these readability models in practice. When applying these models to readability improvements that are made in practice, i.e., commits, they are unable to capture these incremental improvements, despite a clear perceived improvement by the developers. This results in a discrepancy between the models we have built to measure readability, and the actual perception of readability in practice. In this work, we propose a model that is able to detect incremental readability improvements made by developers in practice with an average precision of 79.2% and an average recall of 67% on an unseen test set . We then investigate the metrics that our model associates with developer perceived readability improvements as well as non-readability changes. Finally, we compare our model to existing state-of-the-art readability models, which our model outperforms by at least 23% in terms of precision and 42% in terms of recall.
Tue 14 JulDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
16:30 - 17:30 | |||
16:30 15mPaper | srcClone: Detecting Code Clones via Decompositional Slicing Research Pre-print Media Attached | ||
16:45 15mPaper | Investigating Near-Miss Micro-Clones in Evolving Software Research Manishankar Mondal Assistant Professor, Khulna University, Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan, Chanchal K. Roy University of Saskatchewan, Kevin Schneider University of Saskatchewan Media Attached | ||
17:00 15mPaper | A Model to Detect Readability Improvements in Incremental Changes Research Devjeet Roy Washington State University, Sarah Fakhoury Washington State University, John Lee Washington State University, Venera Arnaoudova Washington State University Media Attached | ||
17:15 15mPaper | Supporting Program Comprehension through Fast Query Response in Large-Scale Systems Research Jinfeng Lin University of Notre Dame, Yalin Liu University of Notre Dame, Jane Cleland-Huang University of Notre Dame Media Attached |