It is widely acknowledged that code style is an important aspect of text based programming. We believe programs written with good style are easier to understand and change and so programmers are able to modify code quickly and correctly. As code changes occur whenever programmers extend functionality or resolve defects, code style is important from the earliest stages of development, before the first commit, through product maintenance. However, it is not entirely clear what is meant by 'code style' and advice on how to achieve it is often vague and/or conflicting. We have created a set of code style principles that we believe capture the essential characteristics of code style at an abstract level. Our objective is to provide a means of assessing code with respect to style that is programming language agnostic and allows implementation choices that are context-specific (for example, reader experience). I describe the principles and our approach to creating, evaluating and refining these.

Bio

Diana received an Honours degree in Mathematics from the Open University of Great Britain, an M.Sc. in Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems from the University of Edinburgh and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Auckland. Her industry background includes C programming (8 years), software process design (4 years) and software quality management (4 years). Her tertiary teaching and research experience spans 18 years. Research interests include the study of situated software practices, software code quality (both a consequence of her experiences in industry) and computer science education (a consequence of teaching experiences in tertiary education).

This talk is part of the New Zealand Software Innovation Seminar (SI^NZ) Series: https://softwareinnovation.nz/seminars/

Zoom Link: https://vuw.zoom.us/my/softwareinnovationnewzealand