An Approach to Automatically Assess Method Names

Abstract

An approach is presented to automatically assess the quality of method names by providing a score and feedback. The approach implements ten method naming standards to evaluate the names. The naming standards are taken from work that validated the standards via a large survey of software professionals. Natural language processing techniques such as part-of-speech tagging, identi?ier splitting, and dictionary lookup are required to implement the standards. The approach is evaluated by ?irst manually constructing a large golden set of method names. Each method name is rated by several developers and labeled as conforming to each standard or not. These ratings allow for comparing the results of the approach against expert assessment. Additionally, the approach is applied to several systems and the results are manually inspected for accuracy.

Type
Publication
The 30th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Program Comprehension (ICPC)