Evaluation of Programming Style

This chapter looks at some programming guidelines that may have direct influence on program comprehension and on the communication between software developers who work on the program in different stages of its life cycle. How can the influence of these guidelines on the developers work be measured? It is difficult to measure code characteristics of the kind discussed here with quantitative evaluation methods; qualitative methods (see Chapter 4) are more appropriate in this case.

Since most software engineering books discuss at length the topic of software evaluation and measurement, our discussion of this topic is brief. We conclude with one lesson worth remembering in any evaluation process (not only of software): Measure what is important to measure, not what is easy to measure.