@inproceedings{HanenbergEtAl_Indentation_JSON_2024,

title = {Indentation and Reading Time: A Controlled Experiment on the Differences Between Generated Indented and Non-indented JSON Objects},

author = {Stefan Hanenberg and Johannes Morzeck and Ole Werger and Stefan Gries and Volker Gruhn},

editor = {Hans-Georg Fill and Francisco José Domínguez Mayo and Marten Sinderen and Leszek A. Maciaszek},

isbn = {978-3-031-61753-9},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-01-01},

booktitle = {Software Technologies},

pages = {50–75},

publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},

address = {Cham},

abstract = {It is commonly accepted to indent source code to improve its readability, but the evidence for that is quite low. Up to 2022 only few experiments can be found that reveal a positive effect of indentation in terms of reported evidence and reported effect size – actually, the authors of the present paper are only aware of one single experiment up to 2022 that matches the previous statement. In other words, the often articulated positive effect of indentation was hardly backed up by experimental results reported in the literature. The situation changed in 2023, where an experiment suddenly revealed a strong (p $$< .001$$<.001) and large (effect size = .832; ratio of means = 2.781) effect of indentation in code consisting of if-statements, i.e., a large effect of indentation on the readability of control flows was measured. However, taking the history of studies on indentation into account, it is reasonable to doubt the results: possibly, the effect was caused by hand-chosen examples, respectively by the kind of code used in the experiment (control flows). The here presented study is a follow-up study. First, instead of using hand-chosen examples, the experiment uses generated code. Next, instead of relying on an application's control flow, the present study focusses on data structures by using JSON objects. And finally, the study was designed as a replicated N-of-1 experiment executed on 40 professional developers, where each single subject receives multiple repetitions of all treatment combinations. The study showed a strong (p < .001) and large (effect size = .596; ratio of means = 6.44) effect of indentation. A further finding was that the indentation effect varies between participants. And finally, the study's results are comparable to the results achieved by running the experiment only on four of the present paper's authors.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/icsoft/DavulcuHWG23b,

title = {An Empirical Study on the Possible Positive Effect of Imperative Constructs 

 in Declarative Languages: The Case with SQL},

author = {Seyfullah Davulcu and Stefan Hanenberg and Ole Werger and Volker Gruhn},

editor = {Hans-Georg Fill and Francisco José Dom'ınguez Mayo and Marten Sinderen and Leszek A. Maciaszek},

url = {https://doi.org/10.5220/0012092300003538},

doi = {10.5220/0012092300003538},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies, 

 ICSOFT 2023, Rome, Italy, July 10-12, 2023},

pages = {428–437},

publisher = {SCITEPRESS},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/icsoft/WergerHMSG23,

title = {Can ChatGPT Generate Code Tasks? An Empirical Study on Using ChatGPT 

 for Generating Tasks for SQL Queries},

author = {Ole Werger and Stefan Hanenberg and Ole Meyer and Nils Schwenzfeier and Volker Gruhn},

editor = {Hans-Georg Fill and Francisco José Dom'ınguez Mayo and Marten Sinderen and Leszek A. Maciaszek},

url = {https://doi.org/10.5220/0012076900003538},

doi = {10.5220/0012076900003538},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies, 

 ICSOFT 2023, Rome, Italy, July 10-12, 2023},

pages = {303–312},

publisher = {SCITEPRESS},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/icsoft/MorzeckHWG23,

title = {Indentation in Source Code: A Randomized Control Trial on the Readability 

 of Control Flows in Java Code with Large Effects},

author = {Johannes Morzeck and Stefan Hanenberg and Ole Werger and Volker Gruhn},

editor = {Hans-Georg Fill and Francisco José Dom'ınguez Mayo and Marten Sinderen and Leszek A. Maciaszek},

url = {https://doi.org/10.5220/0012087500003538},

doi = {10.5220/0012087500003538},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies, 

 ICSOFT 2023, Rome, Italy, July 10-12, 2023},

pages = {117–128},

publisher = {SCITEPRESS},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/icse/ReichlHG23,

title = {Does the Stream API Benefit from Special Debugging Facilities? A 

 Controlled Experiment on Loops and Streams with Specific Debuggers},

author = {Jan Reichl and Stefan Hanenberg and Volker Gruhn},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00058},

doi = {10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00058},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-01-01},

booktitle = {45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, 

 ICSE 2023, Melbourne, Australia, May 14-20, 2023},

pages = {576–588},

publisher = {IEEE},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{MehlhornHanenberg_ICSE_22,

title = {Imperative versus Declarative Collection Processing: An RCT on the  Understandability of Traditional Loops versus the Stream API in  Java},

author = {Nils Mehlhorn and Stefan Hanenberg},

url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9793929},

doi = {10.1145/3510003.3519016},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-01-01},

urldate = {2022-01-01},

booktitle = {44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 25-27 May 2022},

pages = {1157--1168},

publisher = {ACM/IEEE},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/icse/SpadiniPBHBB19,

title = {Test-driven code review: an empirical study},

author = {Davide Spadini and Fabio Palomba and Tobias Baum and Stefan Hanenberg and Magiel Bruntink and Alberto Bacchelli},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00110},

doi = {10.1109/ICSE.2019.00110},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2019, Montreal, QC, Canada, May 25-31, 2019},

pages = {1061--1072},

crossref = {DBLP:conf/icse/2019},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/erlang/GerdesHSHIW18,

title = {Understanding formal specifications through good examples},

author = {Alex Gerdes and John Hughes and Nicholas Smallbone and Stefan Hanenberg and Sebastian Ivarsson and Meng Wang},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3239332.3242763},

doi = {10.1145/3239332.3242763},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Erlang, ICFP 2018, St. Louis, MO, USA, September 23-29, 2018},

pages = {13--24},

crossref = {DBLP:conf/erlang/2018},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/sac/IngibergssonHSS18,

title = {Experience report: studying the readability of a domain specific language},

author = {Johann Thor Mogensen Ingibergsson and Stefan Hanenberg and Joshua Sunshine and Ulrik Pagh Schultz},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3167132.3167436},

doi = {10.1145/3167132.3167436},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2018, Pau, France, April 09-13, 2018},

pages = {2030--2033},

crossref = {DBLP:conf/sac/2018},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/vissoft/HollmannH17,

title = {An Empirical Study on the Readability of Regular Expressions: Textual Versus Graphical},

author = {Niklas Hollmann and Stefan Hanenberg},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/VISSOFT.2017.27},

doi = {10.1109/VISSOFT.2017.27},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-01-01},

booktitle = {IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization, VISSOFT 2017, Shanghai, China, September 18-19, 2017},

pages = {74--84},

crossref = {DBLP:conf/vissoft/2017},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/qrs/NoughiHC17,

title = {An Empirical Study on the Usage of SQL Execution Traces for Program Comprehension},

author = {Nesrine Noughi and Stefan Hanenberg and Anthony Cleve},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS-C.2017.17},

doi = {10.1109/QRS-C.2017.17},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-01-01},

booktitle = {2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security Companion, QRS-C 2017, Prague, Czech Republic, July 25-29, 2017},

pages = {47--54},

crossref = {DBLP:conf/qrs/2017c},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/oopsla/MarterBLH16,

title = {Lightweight programming experiments without programmers and programs: an example study on the effect of similarity and number of object identifiers on the readability of source code using natural texts},

author = {Tim Marter and Paul Babucke and Philipp Lembken and Stefan Hanenberg},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2986012.2986020},

doi = {10.1145/2986012.2986020},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-01-01},

booktitle = {2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software, Onward! 2016, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 2-4, 2016},

pages = {1--14},

crossref = {DBLP:conf/oopsla/2016onward},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/iwpc/OkonH16,

title = {Can we enforce a benefit for dynamically typed languages in comparison to statically typed ones? A controlled experiment},

author = {Sebastian Okon and Stefan Hanenberg},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2016.7503719},

doi = {10.1109/ICPC.2016.7503719},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-01-01},

booktitle = {24th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, ICPC 2016, Austin, TX, USA, May 16-17, 2016},

pages = {1--10},

crossref = {DBLP:conf/iwpc/2016},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/icse/UesbeckSHPD16,

title = {An empirical study on the impact of C++ lambdas and programmer experience},

author = {Phillip Merlin Uesbeck and Andreas Stefik and Stefan Hanenberg and Jan Pedersen and Patrick Daleiden},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2884781.2884849},

doi = {10.1145/2884781.2884849},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2016, Austin, TX, USA, May 14-22, 2016},

pages = {760--771},

crossref = {DBLP:conf/icse/2016},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}