A methodology for measuring the readability and modifiability of computer programs

This paper describes an experimentally based methodology for investigating how the readability and modifiability of computer programs can be expressed in terms of programming style.As one part of the methodology three different measures of the readability and modifiability of a program are established. The measures are obtained by human gradings or scores. As another part these measures are related to computer-evaluable programming style characteristics. The result is a formula yielding the readability and modifiability as a function of measurable program characteristics.In testing the methodology one experiment provided a formula of readability containing six computer-evaluable programming style characteristics. A further experiment indicated that the general validity of this formula of program readability needs further investigation.