Publication accepted at ICSE 2021!

Last updated on Mar 26, 2021 2 min read

On the Naming of Methods: A Survey of Professional Developers was accepted for publication at ICSE 2021

Abstract

This paper describes the results of a large (+1100 responses) survey of professional software developers concerning standards for naming source code methods. The various standardsfor source code method names arederived from and supported in thesoftware engineering literature. The goal of the survey is to determine if there is a general consensus among developers that the standards are acceptedand used in practice. Additionally, the paper examines factors such as years of experience and programming language knowledge in the context of survey responses. The survey results show that participants very much agreeabout the importance of various standards and how theyapplyto namesandthat years of experience and the programming language has almost no effect on their responses.The results imply that the given standards are both valid and to a large degree complete. The work provides a foundation for automated method name assessment during development and code reviews.