Abstract-An identifier is one of the crucial elements for program readability. Method names in an object-oriented program are important identifiers because method names are used for understanding the behavior of the methods without reading a part of the program. It is well-known that each method name should consist of a verb and objects according to general guidelines. However, it is not easy to name methods consistently since each of the developers may have a different understanding of the verbs and objects used in the method names. As a first step to enable developers to name methods consistently and easily, we focus on the verbs used in the method names.In this paper, we present a technique to recommend candidate verbs for a method name so that developers can use consistent verbs for method names. Given a method, we recommend a list of verbs used in many other methods similar to the given method, by using association rules. We have extracted association rules from 445 OSS projects and applied these rules to two projects. As a result, the extracted rules could recommend the current verbs in the top 10 candidates for 60.6% of the methods covered by our approach. Furthermore, we have identified four meaningful groups of rules for verb recommendation.

SUMMARYIt is well-known that program readability is important for maintenance tasks. Method names are important identifiers for program readability because they are used for understanding the behavior of methods without reading a part of the program. Although developers can create a method name by arbitrarily choosing a verb and objects, the names are expected to represent the behavior consistently. However, it is not easy for developers to choose verbs and objects consistently since each developer may have a different notion of a suitable lexicon for method names. In this paper, we propose a technique to recommend candidate verbs for a method name so that developers can use various verbs consistently. We recommend candidate verbs likely to be used as a part of a method name, using association rules extracted from existing methods. To evaluate our technique, we have extracted rules from 445 open source projects written in Java and confirmed the accuracy of our approach by applying the extracted rules to several open source applications. As a result, we found that 84.9% of the considered methods in four projects are recommended the existing verb. Moreover, we found that 73.2% of the actual renamed methods in six projects are recommended the correct verb.

SUMMARYIn a previous study, we proposed a technique to recommend candidate verbs for a method name so that developers can consistently use various verbs. In this study, we improve the rule extraction technique proposed in this previous study. Moreover, we confirm that the rank of each correct verb recommended by the new technique is higher than that by the previous technique.

In modern software development, developers have to select and combine appropriate APIs from software libraries to implement any features. This paper proposes an approach that takes as input a method name which a developer is attempting to create, and suggests APIs that are likely used as a template of method body. By using the template as a reference and/or editing the template, the developer can write the method body. Our approach generates templates from association rules that associate APIs with identifiers such as method names, class names, and field types/names included in a large set of source files.