Related papers: Improving Semantic Consistency of Variable Names w…

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…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

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…

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…

This paper describes the results of a large (+1100 responses) survey of professional software developers concerning standards for naming source code methods. The various standards for source code method names are derived from and supported…

Variable names are important to understand and maintain code. If a variable name and the value stored in the variable do not match, then the program suffers from a name-value inconsistency, which is due to one of two situations that…

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…

With an increasing number of value-flow properties to check, existing static program analysis still tends to have scalability issues when high precision is required. We observe that the key design flaw behind the scalability problem is that…

Unknowingly, identifiers in the source code of a software system play a vital role in determining the quality of the system. Ambiguous and confusing identifier names lead developers to not only misunderstand the behavior of the code but…

There are often multiple ways to implement the same requirement in source code. Different implementation choices can result in code snippets that are similar, and have been defined in multiple ways: code clones, examples, simions and…

Intermediate variables can be used to break complex expressions into more manageable smaller expressions, which may be easier to understand. But it is unclear when and whether this actually helps. We conducted an experiment in which…

Automatic testing is a widely adopted technique for improving software quality. Software developers add, remove and update test methods and test classes as part of the software development process as well as during the evolution phase,…

Misleading method names in software projects can confuse developers, which may lead to software defects and affect code understandability. In this paper, we present DeepName, a context-based, deep learning approach to detect method name…

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…

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…

In software engineering (SE) tasks, the naming approach is so important that it attracts many scholars from all over the world to study how to improve the quality of method names. To accurately recommend method names, we employ a novel…

An inherently abstract nature of source code makes programs difficult to understand. In our research, we designed three techniques utilizing concrete values of variables and other expressions during program execution. RuntimeSearch is a…

Source code is inherently abstract, which makes it difficult to understand. Activities such as debugging can reveal concrete runtime details, including the values of variables. However, they require that a developer explicitly requests…

Extract local variable is one of the most popular refactorings, and most IDEs and refactoring tools provide automated support for this refactoring. However, we find approximately 70% of the names recommended by these IDEs are different from…

Developers relax restrictions on a type to reuse methods with other types. While type casts are prevalent, in weakly typed languages such as C++, they are also extremely permissive. Assignments where a source expression is cast into a new…