The International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement is the premier scientific conference in the area of empirical studies in software engineering. Marvin Muñoz Barón, Marvin Wyrich and Stefan Wagner of the Empirical Software Engineering Group published and presented their paper "An Empirical Evaluation of Complexity as a Measure of Source Code Understandability" at that conference.
The paper presents a large meta-study using existing data from existing experiments on code comprehension investigating whether the recently proposed metric Cognitive Complexity is a valid measure for how understandable code is. Interestingly, we found good support for that measure. More details can be found in the paper directly.
To our great delight, the authors received at the conference the Best Full Paper Award recognising it as the best full research paper of the whole programme.
14th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement