Application domain and programming language readability yardsticks

Abstract

Software maintainability is one of the most factors that used to ensure software quality. It targets the structure of the software rather than its functionality. Hence, code readability is highlighted whenever maintainability is discussed. There is a huge difference between an organized code and a messy code, or between easy to read code and a difficult to read code. This difference can be very subjective but many efforts have been put together in order to formalize it. Therefore, the result was a set of readability factors that have a direct or indirect impact on software readability. These factors measure to which extent readers can understand the text of the software code. Many metrics were developed to generalize the readability score across a set of pieces of code. Unfortunately, not all proposed metrics take into account the possibility of having variable readability factors. This paper tries to investigate to which extent the readability factors considering different application domains. Since readability is very subjective, it will be interesting to see whether it is useful to have specialized readability models that measure this attribute. This also implies looking into the impact of these readability models on measuring software quality.