Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (Oct 2004)
An Experiment of Evaluating Software Understandability
Abstract
Software understandability is one of important characteristics of software quality because it can influence cost or reliability at software evolution in reuse or maintenance. But it is difficult to evaluate software understandability because understanding is an internal process of humans. So, we propose "software overhaul" as a method for externalizing process of understanding software systems and propose a probability model for evaluating software understandability based on it. This paper presented the experiment of evaluating software understandability using a probabilistic model.