A Model to Detect Readability Improvements in Incremental Changes
| Autor: | Devjeet Roy, Sarah Fakhoury, Venera Arnaoudova, John Lee |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Measure (data warehouse)
Source code Recall business.industry Computer science media_common.quotation_subject 020207 software engineering 02 engineering and technology 010501 environmental sciences computer.software_genre 01 natural sciences Software quality Readability Perception Test set 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Code (cryptography) Artificial intelligence business computer Natural language processing 0105 earth and related environmental sciences media_common |
| Zdroj: | ICPC |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3387904.3389255 |
| Popis: | 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. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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