A New Metric for Code Readability

Abstract

Code readability is very important in software development process. It has relationship with software quality. In this paper we define a new readability metric that can be used to measure the readability of given source code. From senior software engineers we collected some rules and then deduced them into a metric which can be used to measure the readability of code. Moreover we implemented some of the existing readability metrics such as Automated Readability Index (ARI), Gunning's Fox Index (FOG) and SMOG programmatically. The results of these metrics are compared with the each other. We have developed a prototype application that takes source code as input and applies metric. The metric generates readability statistics. The input code is given to 50 software engineers and asked them to provide the percentage of readability of code. The percentage given by them is compared with the proposed application generated statistics. The results revealed that both are closely matching and the proposed metric can be used in the real world applications.