Concise and consistent naming

Abstract

Approximately 70% of the source code of a software system consists of identifiers. Hence, the names chosen as identifiers are of paramount importance for the readability of computer programs and therewith their comprehensibility. However, virtually every programming language allows programmers to use almost arbitrary sequences of characters as identifiers which far too often results in more or less meaningless or even misleading naming. Coding style guides somehow address this problem but are usually limited to general and hard to enforce rules like "identifiers should be self-describing". This paper renders adequate identifier naming far more precisely. A formal model, based on bijective mappings between concepts and names, provides a solid foundation for the definition of precise rules for concise and consistent naming. The enforcement of these rules is supported by a tool that incrementally builds and maintains a complete identifier dictionary while the system is being developed. The identifier dictionary explains the language used in the software system, aids in consistent naming, and supports programmers by proposing suitable names depending on the current context.

Assisting code search with automatic Query Reformulation for bug localization

“…In this paper, we use the titles of the bug reports to populate the set of queries B as they are less noisy and they resemble the real world search queries better than the descriptions. In order to index the source code and perform the retrievals with QR, we extended Terrier 6 , a flexible open source platform developed in Java [25].…”

“…The problem of constructing a good query for code search is exacerbated by the fact that, despite the naming conventions in all programming languages, arbitrary abbreviations and concatenations are frequently used in source code for the naming of concepts, objects, artifacts, and so on [6]. Therefore, searching a code base for concepts, objects, artifacts, etc., using terms that are oblivious to the abbreviation and concatenations actually used can, in the worst case, miss out entirely on the files highly relevant to a given search, and, in the best, result in poor values for the relevancies.…”

Integrating conceptual and logical couplings for change impact analysis in software

“…Identifiers used by programmers for names of classes, methods, or attributes in source code or other artifacts contain important information and account for approximately half of the source code in software (Deissenboeck and Pizka 2005;Deissenboeck and Pizka 2006). These names often serve as a starting point in many program comprehension tasks (Caprile and Tonella 1999;Haiduc and Marcus 2008;Abebe et al 2009;Arnaoudova et al 2010).…”

Physical and conceptual identifier dispersion: Measures and relation to fault proneness

“…However, we believe that fault proneness is a complex phenomenon hardly captured solely by structural characteristics of code entities. Indeed, several studies showed that identifiers impact program comprehension (e.g., [5], [6], [7], [8]) and code quality (e.g., [3], [9], [10]). We concur with Deißenböck and Pizka's observation that proper identifiers improve quality and that identifiers should be used consistently [6].…”

“…Indeed, several studies showed that identifiers impact program comprehension (e.g., [5], [6], [7], [8]) and code quality (e.g., [3], [9], [10]). We concur with Deißenböck and Pizka's observation that proper identifiers improve quality and that identifiers should be used consistently [6]. Source code with high quality identifiers, carefully chosen and consistently used in their contexts, likely ease program comprehension and support developers in building consistent and coherent conceptual models.…”