Enhancing Code Understandability Through a Heuristic Rules Analysis for Small Software Vendors

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs), which are recognized as having a significant impact on the economies of developing countries, require specialized software frameworks to design and manage their systems. However, software developers often face challenges in maintaining existing software systems, particularly when trying to comprehend complex code. While researchers have proposed code interpretation principles to help with this, these principles do not focus on code structure transformation. In this study, a code transformation approach is presented to improve the readability of code structure. The approach includes a set of heuristic rules based on five primary transformation rules for analysis. Two case studies were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the method, and the results show that it is easier and less time-consuming for developers to understand the code under examination when using this approach compared to conventional methods.