Replication of a Study about the Impact of Method Chaining and Comments on Readability and Comprehension

It is well known that readability is an essential feature of quality code, and that many factors can affect the readability of code. This paper presents a conceptual replication of a previous experimental study that evaluated two practices associated with source code readability, namely, use of comments and method chaining. The replication study has the same research questions as the original study and involved almost all students of an OOP course of an informatics engineering program. The research process is presented, alongside decisions made and differences from the original study. Concerning perceived readability, our study found no significant differences between method chaining variants and between comment variants. The original study did find a significant difference for comments variants. In the case of comprehension, we found no significant differences between the method chaining variants but found a significant difference for an $a= 0.1\%$ among comments variants, both as opposed to the original study.