Investigating the Use of Code Analysis and NLP to Promote a Consistent Usage of Identifiers

Abstract

Meaningless identifiers as well as inconsistent use of identifiers in the source code might hinder code readability and result in increased software maintenance efforts. Over the past years, effort has been devoted to promoting a consistent usage of identifiers across different parts of a system through approaches exploiting static code analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP). These techniques have been evaluated in small-scale studies, but it is unclear how they compare to each other and how they complement each other. Furthermore, a full-fledged larger empirical evaluation is still missing.,,We aim at bridging this gap. We asked developers of five projects to assess the meaningfulness of the recommendations generated by three techniques, two already existing in the literature (one exploiting static analysis, one using NLP) and a novel one we propose. With a total of 922 rename refactorings evaluated, this is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest empirical study conducted to assess and compare rename refactoring tools promoting a consistent use of identifiers. Our study sheds light on the current state-of-the-art in rename refactoring recommenders, and indicates directions for future work.