Developers must comprehend the code they will maintain, meaning that the code must be legible and reasonably self-descriptive. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of research and tooling that supports developers in understanding their naming practices; whether the names they choose make sense, whether they are consistent, and whether they convey the information required of them. In this paper, we present IDEAL, a tool that will provide feedback to developers about their identifier naming practices. Among its planned features, it will support linguistic anti-pattern detection, which is what will be discussed in this paper. IDEAL is designed to, and will, be extended to cover further anti-patterns, naming structures, and practices in the near future. IDEAL is open-source and publicly available, with a demo video available at: https://youtu.be/fVoOYGe50zg
@article{arxiv.2107.08344,
title = {IDEAL: An Open-Source Identifier Name Appraisal Tool},
author = {Anthony Peruma and Venera Arnaoudova and Christian D. Newman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.08344},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Accepted at: The 37th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME '21)