> High quality code can simply be defined as code that has few bugs. Unfortunately that's a little harder to measure, but they could've at least analysed the is

> High quality code can simply be defined as code that has few bugs. Unfortunately that's a little harder to measure, but they could've at least analysed the issues for a start. It is nearly impossible to measure directly. One needs to find all the bugs to measure defect density directly. There are indirect ways, one could use a proxy variable, and they did. They used static analysis as a proxy variable, this choice has some traps to avoid, but bugs from bug-trackers or CVE's is highly dependent on a development practices and popularity of the code, they can (I'd say must) correlate with swearing by themselves. To deal with that one would need to formulate a causal hypothesis for real and to test it for real. Such a study is not for a bachelor thesis, it would be master's at least. Though I'd like to see authors to sophisticate their techniques enough to dig out a causal explanation.