Enhancing software comments readability

Other Title(s)

تحسين مستوى القراءة للتعليقات الخاصة بالشفرة الإلكترونية

Dissertant

Uthman, Abd T.

Thesis advisor

Ilayyan, Dirar

University

Birzeit University

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering and Technology

Department

Department of Computer Science

University Country

Palestine (West Bank)

Degree

Master

Degree Date

2018

English Abstract

Programming comments are used to explain the code meaning and to understand communications between programmers or between programmers and editors (QAs, auditors, code reviewers).

Because code with comments could be more descriptive, and easy to understand from code without comments and then easy to reuse or maintain.

However, these comments are considered as part of the code without being tested or compiled, as they are written with high professional language or in natural language with spelling and structural faults, which can’t be understood by others and this makes its existence superfluous. The main aim of this research is to develop a tool that helps programmers to write readable comments on code and measures their readability according to predefined criteria.

Also, this tool suggests comments and keywords to enhance the software readability by providing alternatives to both the keywords and the comment statements.

These alternative terms are listed in local database in addition to online dictionary consumed from “Datamuse API that is a word-finding query engine for developers”.

On the other hand, the readability procedure will be measured by evaluating the comments readability from passing the comment text to function that used three different formulas Fog index, Flesch reading ease score, and Flesch-Kincaid grade level. A questionnaire has been designed to compare readability between both the new comments from tool and original from human.

This questionnaire has been disseminated to a target of (42 programmers and 35 students from computer science from BZU).

From programmers the result was the comments from proposed tool have less complex words and took less time to read.

But it did not significantly affect the understandability of the text; we guess that this comes from the high level of English of programmers and as [30] says that there a strong correlation between reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge.

So we can say that the tool reduced the complexity of the text and the time to read it.

On the other hand, these two factors are important if we look to the cost effect of reduced time consumption to read text with code readable.

The two factors above also influence any work related to code understanding.

However, the result from students were the tool affected the understandability of text in addition to affecting the time of reading and text complexity were that the tool make new comments text more readable from changing the three studied variables in a positive way.

Main Subjects

Information Technology and Computer Science

Topics

• Encryption

No. of Pages

71

Table of Contents

• APA
• MLA
• AMA

Language

English

Data Type

Arab Theses

Record ID

BIM-889316