research-article

A survey of the forms of Java reference names

Authors:

Michel Wermelinger,

Yijun YuAuthors Info & Claims

ICPC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

Pages 196 - 206

Published: 16 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The readability of identifiers is a major factor of program comprehension and an aim of naming convention guidelines. Due to their semantic content, identifiers are also used in feature and bug location, among other software maintenance tasks. Looking at how names are used in practice may lead to insights on potential problems for comprehension and for programming support tools that process identifiers.

Class and method names are already well represented in the literature. This paper presents an investigation of Java field, formal argument and local variable names, which we collectively call reference names. These names cannot be ignored because they constitute over half the unique names and almost 70% of the name declarations in the corpus investigated.

We analysed the forms of 3.5 million reference name declarations in 60 well known Java projects, examining the phrasal structure of names composed of known words and acronyms. The structures found in practice were evaluated against those given in the literature. The use of unknown abbreviations and words, which may pose a problem for program comprehension, was also identified. Based on our observations of the rich diversity of reference names, we suggest issues to be taken into account for future academic research and for improving tools that rely on names as sources of information.

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Cited By

Alsuhaibani RNewman CDecker MCollard MMaletic J(2021)On the Naming of MethodsProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00061(587-599)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00061
Schröter IKrüger JSiegmund JLeich TScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)Comprehending studies on program comprehensionProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.9(308-311)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2017.9

Index Terms

A survey of the forms of Java reference names
1. General and reference
  1. Document types
    1. Surveys and overviews
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types

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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICPC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

May 2015

325 pages

General Chair:
Andrea De Lucia
University of Salerno, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Christian Bird
Microsoft Research
,
Rocco Oliveto
University of Molise, Italy

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS\DATC: IEEE Computer Society
TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 16 May 2015

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ICSE '15

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ACM
SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS\DATC
TCSE

ICSE '15: 37th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 16 - 24, 2015

Florence, Italy

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Cited By

Alsuhaibani RNewman CDecker MCollard MMaletic J(2021)On the Naming of MethodsProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00061(587-599)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00061
Schröter IKrüger JSiegmund JLeich TScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)Comprehending studies on program comprehensionProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.9(308-311)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2017.9

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