Code convention adherence in evolving software

Maintainability is a desired property of software, and a variety of metrics have been proposed for measuring it, focusing on different notions of complexity and code readability. Many practices have been proposed to improve maintainability through code refactorings: improving the cohesion, simplification of interfaces, renamings to improve understandability. Code conventions are a body of advice on lexical and syntactic aspects of code, aiming to standardize low-level code design under the assumption that such a systematic approach will make code easier to read, understand, and maintain. We present the first stage in our examination of code-convention adherence practices as a proxy measurement for maintainability. Based on a preliminary survey of software engineers, we identify a set of coding conventions that most relate to maintainability. Then we devise a “convention adherence” metric, based on the number and severity of violations of a defined coding convention. Finally, we analyze several open-source projects according to this metric to better understand how consistent different teams are with respect to adopting and conforming to code conventions.