Replication of a Study about the Impact of Method Chaining and Comments on Readability and Comprehension

It is well known that readability is an essential feature of quality code, and that many factors can affect the readability of code. This paper presents a conceptual replication of a previous experimental study that evaluated two practices associated with source code readability, namely, use of comm...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	2024 4th International Conference on Code Quality (ICCQ) pp. 35 - 52
Main Authors:	Sampaio, Isabel Braga, Sampaio, Alberto
Format:	Conference Proceeding
Language:	English
Published:	IEEE 22-06-2024
Subjects:	Code quality Codes Comprehension empirical study Informatics Perceived readability Sociology Software Software readability Source coding Statistics Time measurement
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	It is well known that readability is an essential feature of quality code, and that many factors can affect the readability of code. This paper presents a conceptual replication of a previous experimental study that evaluated two practices associated with source code readability, namely, use of comments and method chaining. The replication study has the same research questions as the original study and involved almost all students of an OOP course of an informatics engineering program. The research process is presented, alongside decisions made and differences from the original study. Concerning perceived readability, our study found no significant differences between method chaining variants and between comment variants. The original study did find a significant difference for comments variants. In the case of comprehension, we found no significant differences between the method chaining variants but found a significant difference for an a= 0.1\% among comments variants, both as opposed to the original study.
DOI:	10.1109/ICCQ60895.2024.10576941