An approach to experimental evaluation of software understandability

Software understandability is an important characteristic of software quality because it can influence cost or reliability of 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 overhauling to estimate software understandability. An example describes an overhaul tool and its application.