Challenges in Explaining Source Code Quality Assessment
Jeremy Ludwig, Devin Cline · 2022 IEEE Aerospace Conference (AERO) · 2022
Creating and maintaining high-quality source code is especially important for critical systems such as those made for aerospace and military domains as well as for software product lines where long-lived, reusable modules are intended to be shared by multiple systems. CBR-Insight is an open-source automated assessment tool that relies on data science and interface design to provide an objective and understandable measure of source code quality. CBR-Insight supports the ability of technical and non-technical decision makers to verify that a project's software implementation follows through on promises around developing and sustaining reliable and maintainable software while managing technical debt. The primary contribution of this work is an in-depth discussion on how source code quality assessment is communicated to the entire development team in CBR-Insight, spanning from non-technical decision makers overseeing the project to the software developers responsible for source code. Specific issues discussed include understandability of the explanations provided by the user interface along with transparency and trust in the underlying, technically complex, calculations and scoring algorithms.