Software understandability is one of important characteristics of software quality because it can influence cost or reliability at software evolution in reuse or maintenance. However, it is difficult to evaluate software understandability in practice because understanding is an internal process of humans. This paper proposes "software overhaul" as a method for externalizing the process of understanding and presents a probability model to use process data of overhaul to estimate software understandability. An example describes an overhaul tool and an application of it.
Index Terms:
measurement, experimentation, human factors, reuse, maintenance, and evolution
Citation:
K. Shima, Y. Takemura, K. Matsumoto, "An Approach to Experimental Evaluation of Software Understandability," isese, pp.48, 2002 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE'02), 2002