Dealing with identifiers and comments in source code comprehension and maintenance
Felice Salviulo, Giuseppe Scanniello · 2014
There are a number of empirical studies that assess the benefit deriving from the use of documentation and models in the execution of maintenance tasks. The greater part of these studies are quantitative and fail to analyze the values, beliefs, and assumptions that inform and shape source code comprehensibility and maintainability. We designed and conducted a qualitative study to understand the role of source code comments and identifiers in source code comprehensibility and maintainability. In particular, we sought to understand how novice and young professional developers perceive comments and identifier names after they have inspected the system behavior visible in its user interfaces. Novice developers were 18 third-year Bachelor students in Computer Science. The young professional developers were 12 and had work experience in between 3 months and 2 and half years. The used qualitative methodological approach is ethnographic. We asked the participants to inspect the behavior of a Java application visible in its user interfaces and then to comprehend and modify the source code of that application. We immersed ourselves and participated to the study, while collecting data by means of contemporaneous field notes, audio recordings, and copies of various artifacts. From the collected data, we have identified insights into comprehension and maintenance practices. The main insights can be summarized as follows: (i) with respect to novice developers, professional developers prefer to deal with identifier names rather than comments, (ii) all the participants indicate as essential the use of naming convention techniques for identifiers, and (iii) for all the participants the names of identifiers are important and should be properly chosen. Summarizing, independently from the kind of developer, it is advisable to use naming convention techniques and to properly choose identifiers.