Readability of Code Snippets Included in Stack Overflow Questions: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Stack Overflow (SO) is a popular question and answer site for programmers of all skill levels. In Stack Overflow software developers asks questions with sample code segments, supporting description, and if needed with bug report. However, the quality of the questioner code is poorly readable to attract the solution of the answerer. In this paper, we explore the idea of Java code readability from Stack Overflow question and tried to investigate the impact of the criteria in code readability. This research is the first study on Java code readability from Stack Overflow that we are aware of. We propose a novel dataset of Java code readability criteria from Stack Overflow. Our study consists of 21 readability metric of Java, 241 SO questions, three human annotators, and two experts. With collecting SO Questions with Java tag from SO site, three human annotators manually evaluated the dataset and later the annotation were rechecked by two software experts. Moreover, we tried to analyse the impact of the criteria in code readability and the correlations between readability and different performance measures of SO site like readability vs score mechanism, readability vs accepted answers, and so on. Finally, we discuss how our study will encourage new inquirer to ask a good readable question so that he can get an answer he was looking for as early as possible.