Code Legibility
Program comprehension is a required activity for any software maintenance and evolution task. Even when documentation is available, software developers have to understand fine-grained elements of the source code to be able to modify it. These elements relate to visual, structural, and semantic characteristics of the source code of a program and may hinder program comprehension.
Formatting elements, such as spacing, are factors that impact the legibility of the source code and, consequently, may affect the ability of developers to identify the elements of the code while reading it. Structural and semantic characteristics, such as programming constructs, impact the readability of the source code and may affect the ability of developers to understand it while reading the code. We use the term understandability to refer to the ease with which developers are able to extract information from a program that is useful for a software development- or maintenance-related task just by reading its source code. Understandability is impacted by legibility and readability.
We are interested in program understandability, particularly aspects of programming languages, and programming styles that affect understandability, methods of measuring understandability, and the methods of improving understandability.
This is a joint project led by Fernando Castor at Utrecht University.