A simpler model of software readability
Proceedings of the 8th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Improving the tokenisation of identifier names
Proceedings of the 25th European conference on Object-oriented programming
What is middleware made of?: exploring abstractions, concepts, and class names in modern middleware
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware
The impact of identifier style on effort and comprehension
Empirical Software Engineering
An approach for web service discoverability anti-pattern detection for journal of web engineering
Journal of Web Engineering
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Given the importance of identifier names and the value of naming conventions to program comprehension, we speculated in previous work whether a connection exists between the quality of identifier names and software quality. We found that flawed identifiers in Java classes were associated with source code found to be of low quality by static analysis. This paper extends that work in three directions. First, we show that the association also holds at the finer granularity level of Java methods. This in turn makes it possible to, secondly, apply existing method-level quality and readability metrics, and see that flawed identifiers still impact on this richer notion of code quality and comprehension. Third, we check whether the association can be used in a practical way. We adopt techniques used to evaluate medical diagnostic tests in order to identify which particular identifier naming flaws could be used as a light-weight diagnostic of potentially problematic Java source code for maintenance.