Automatic Segmentation of Method Code into Meaningful Blocks: Design and Evaluation

Abstract

SUMMARYGood programming practice and guidelines suggest that programmers use both vertical and horizontal spacing to visibly delineate between code segments that represent different algorithmic steps or high-level actions. Unfortunately, programmers do not always follow these guidelines. Editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) can easily indent codes based on syntax, but they do not currently support automatic blank line insertion, which presents more significant challenges involving the semantics.This paper presents and evaluates a heuristic solution to the automatic blank line insertion problem by leveraging both program structure and naming information to identify 'meaningful blocks', consecutive statements that logically implement a high-level action. Our tool, SEGMENT, takes as input a Java method and outputs a segmented version that separates meaningful blocks by vertical spacing. We report on several studies involving human judgments to evaluate the effectiveness of the automatic blank line insertion algorithm, for different size methods and for different levels of programmer expertise. The results indicate strong positive overall opinion of SEGMENT's effectiveness in comparison with both developer-written blank lines and blank lines inserted by newcomers to the code. The results vary only slightly among short and long methods, and among novice and advanced programmers. SEGMENT assists in making users obtain an overall picture of a method's actions and comprehend it quicker as well as provides hints for internal documentation placement.

Enhancing Code Readability through Automated Consistent Formatting

“…Refactoring, when carried out correctly, can enhance software quality by improving readability, maintainability, and extensibility [16]. In addition, studies suggest that simple blank lines are more critical than comments when assessing software readability [17]. Furthermore, a readable coding strategy is beneficial for future maintenance and facilitates the understanding and transfer of rules in different domains and pipelines [18].…”

Code refactoring using slice-based cohesion metrics and aspect-oriented programming

“…Here, we compare our proposed technique with some of the existing work. Wang et al (2014) have developed a tool called SEGMENT that inserts blank lines into the given method to increase the readability of the program. They tried to identify the important points in a program where there is a need of vertical space between the lines of code to improve readability.…”

SCAN: an approach to label and relate execution trace segments

“…Wang et al . proposed an approach that automatically segments source code methods into meaningful blocks for the purpose of automatic blank line insertion . The approach uses the program structure and identifiers to identify consecutive statements that logically implement a high‐level action.…”