The Effects of Comments and Indentation on Code Quality Perception: An Eye-Tracking Study of CS1 Students

How easy it is to read and understand a piece of code can very much depend on the code style and whether its author took care of this. Particularly novice programmers could greatly benefit from well styled code. At the same time, they can lack the experience and expertise to adhere to code style conventions in their own code.

In this thesis, you will analyze an existing data set of novice code contributions with respect to code style. Based on these insights, you will perform additional empricial experiments, i.e. using surveys, lab experiments, eye tracking studies, etc. to further determine how code style is perceived by programmers of different levels of expertise and how we can support them to create better code.

This thesis is supervised in collaboration with the chair on Technology-Enhanced Learning.