On the Naming of Methods: A Survey of Professional Developers Reem S. Alsuhaibani Christian D. Newman Michael J. Decker Michael L. Collard Jonathan I. Maletic Computer Science Software Engineering Computer Science Computer Science Computer Science Kent State University Rochester Institute of Bowling Green State The University of Akron Kent State University Prince Sultan University Technology University Ohio, USA Ohio, USA Riyadh, Saudi Arabia New York, USA Ohio, USA
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—This paper describes the results of a large (+1100 Here, we focus specifically on the names given to methods responses) survey of professional software developers concerning in object-oriented software systems. However, much of this also standards for naming source code methods. The various applies to (free) functions in non-object-oriented systems (or standards for source code method names are derived from and parts). We focus on methods for several reasons. First, we are supported in the software engineering literature. The goal of the interested in method naming in the context of automatic method survey is to determine if there is a general consensus among summarization and documentation. Furthermore, different developers that the standards are accepted and used in practice. programming language constructs have their own naming Additionally, the paper examines factors such as years of guidelines. That is, local variables are named differently than experience and programming language knowledge in the context methods, which are named differently than classes [10,11]. Of of survey responses. The survey results show that participants these, prior work has found that function names have the largest very much agree about the importance of various standards and how they apply to names and that years of experience and the number of unique name variants when analyzed at the level of programming language has almost no effect on their responses.