Richard,
I want to run a small readability experiment this semester as a class exercise. I've done a lot of web searching looking for guidelines, but not found anything really helpful.
I wrote about an interesting readability experiment here: http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2009/01/20/readability-an-experimental-view/ Perhaps you could show them single statements and manipulate the variables names, asking subjects to judge which was more informative: http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2009/12/11/information-content-of-expressions/
My idea is - 3 programs, about 2 pages each - 3 styles - Latin square - record reading times + time to find mistakes + confidence in answers + comprehension questions + demographics (age, experience) - students should criticise the experiment Looking at it dispassionately, the program size isn't really enough to evaluate the question I'm interested in, but it's about as much as I can ask people to do for an assignment. The point is to give the students experience with what a (toy) software engineering experiment is like. Anyone have any ideas on what good comprehension questions look like? The programming language is basically an imperative pseudocode to avoid the "if this is Java then it ought to be laid out/ spelled/structured/ like this" effect.
-- Derek M. Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[email protected] Source code analysis http://www.knosof.co.uk -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
