Relating Identifier Naming Flaws and Code Quality: An Empirical Study

Authors:
Simon Butler;Michel Wermelinger;Yijun Yu;Helen Sharp
Affiliations:
-;-;-;-
Venue:
WCRE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 16th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
Year:
2009

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Abstract

Studies have demonstrated the importance of good identifier names to program comprehension. It is unclear, however, whether poor naming has other effects that might impact maintenance effort, e.g. on code quality. We evaluated the quality of identifier names in 8 established open source Java applications libraries, using a set of 12 identifier naming guidelines. We found statistically significant associations between flawed identifiers (i.e. violating at least one guideline) and code quality issues reported by FindBugs, a static analysis tool.