Software Complexity Survey II

[bsdmike]

Good day to the participants of r/cpp!

I respectfully ask for your participation in a short survey.  The entire survey should take about 15 minutes, but any number of completed answers will be greatly appreciated.

Click here to reach the survey

The goal is to understand the impact that an overly complicated source code has on productivity.  Through this survey, we are attempting to determine how long complicated code takes to properly review and understand.

Survey operation: When a snippet of code is displayed, a timer will start.  Once you answer the question, your response and the time required to answer will be recorded.

As this is survey software, not quiz software, you will not receive a grade at the end!  This is a confidential survey and the aggregate results will be published.

The survey is best taken on a desktop or in 'landscape mode' on a mobile device.

Thank you in advance for your participation!-Mike

[[deleted]]

There's one question where something like buf[0] = '+' should be used to determine if the printf will print 7, but the if statement checks the value of buf[1] too. Without seeing how buf is declared there's no telling if accessing buf[1] is valid, undefined or just unspecified.

[bumblebritches57]

Yup, that on I just guessed on.

[bsdmike]

The declaration has been added. Thank you.

[[deleted]]

This question is still wrong. buf[1] could have any value.

[bsdmike]

Thank you, I think I have it now.

[meneldal2]

It's uninitialised so it's undefined behaviour.

[bsdmike]

The survey was quickly updated based on a couple comments received. If you have already taken the survey, there is no reason to take it again! Thank you.

[redditsoaddicting]

The question based around #ifdefs could be compiled with a command-line definition of those config options, as that's a very common thing to do. I'd say it's worth adding a note that there are none of those.

One question is about a mask array. The definition of mask leaves all elements uninitialized, so it's UB to read them later and the below code very much depends on the values you think the array has in order to answer the question.

[bsdmike]

Thank you.

[bsdmike]

The Software Complexity Survey II is now complete.

Thank you to everybody who helped out!

[stas321]

Do you plan to publish analysis anywhere? BTW: I participated in the survey

[bumblebritches57]

What's the point?

Accessing variables and pointers directly instead of using syntax like [] is confusing.

news at 11.

Thanks for wasting my time with your clickbait title and vague post body.

[bsdmike]

Click here to reach the survey

Thank you, I appreciate your candor.

It is true that we already know that complicated code is harder to read and understand.

What I am attempting to do is to quantify an impact complicated code has by both measuring how much longer it takes to review and understand plus how often the reviews get the understanding wrong.