Related papers: Towards a Model to Appraise and Suggest Identifier…
Identifier names play a significant role in program comprehension activities, with high-quality names improving developer productivity and system quality. To correct poor-quality names, developers rename identifiers to reflect their…
Identifiers, such as method and variable names, form a large portion of source code. Therefore, low-quality identifiers can substantially hinder code comprehension. To support developers in using meaningful identifiers, several…
Identifier names, which comprise a significant portion of the codebase, are the cornerstone of effective program comprehension. However, research has shown that poorly chosen names can significantly increase cognitive load and hinder…
Before any software maintenance can occur, developers must read the identifier names found in the code to be maintained. Thus, high-quality identifier names are essential for productive program comprehension and maintenance activities. With…
Renaming identifiers in source code is a common refactoring task in software development. When renaming an identifier, other identifiers containing words with the same naming intention related to the renaming should be renamed…
Naming is very important in software development, as names are often the only vehicle of meaning about what the code is intended to do. A recent study on how developers choose names collected the names given by different developers for the…
Background: The renaming of program identifiers is the most common refactoring operation. Because some identifiers are related to each other, developers may need to rename related identifiers together. Aims: To understand how developers…
Identifiers make up a majority of the text in code. They are one of the most basic mediums through which developers describe the code they create and understand the code that others create. Therefore, understanding the patterns latent in…
The names of variables and functions serve as implicit documentation and are instrumental for program comprehension. But choosing good meaningful names is hard. We perform a sequence of experiments in which a total of 334 subjects are…
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…
Proper naming of methods can make program code easier to understand, and thus enhance software maintainability. Yet, developers may use inconsistent names due to poor communication or a lack of familiarity with conventions within the…
Program code contains functions, variables, and data structures that are represented by names. To promote human understanding, these names should describe the role and use of the code elements they represent. But the names given by…
Research scientists increasingly rely on implementing software to support their research. While previous research has examined the impact of identifier names on program comprehension in traditional programming environments, limited work has…
Identifier names convey useful information about the intended semantics of code. Name-based program analyses use this information, e.g., to detect bugs, to predict types, and to improve the readability of code. At the core of name-based…
Developers routinely work with source files whose variable names are generic or misleading, and with teams moving quickly, many functions are left undocumented. This slows comprehension, increases the risk of subtle bugs, and makes it…
Identifier names are crucial components of code, serving as primary clues for developers to understand program behavior. This paper investigates the linguistic structure of identifier names by extending the concept of grammar patterns,…
Refactoring is an indispensable practice of improving the quality and maintainability of source code in software evolution. Rename refactoring is the most frequently performed refactoring that suggests a new name for an identifier to…
In response to the prevailing challenges in contemporary software development, this article introduces an innovative approach to code augmentation centered around Impermanent Identifiers. The primary goal is to enhance the software…
Comprehensibility of source code is strongly affected by identifier names, therefore software developers need to give good (e.g. meaningful but short) names to identifiers. On the other hand, giving a good name is sometimes a difficult and…
Context. Source code refactoring is a well-established approach to improving source code quality without compromising its external behavior. Motivation. The literature described the benefits of refactoring, yet its application in practice…