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arXiv · 2107.08344

IDEAL: An Open-Source Identifier Name Appraisal Tool

Anthony Peruma·Venera Arnaoudova·Christian D. Newman
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Abstract

Developers must comprehend the code they will maintain, meaning that the code must be legible and reasonably self-descriptive. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of research and tooling that supports developers in understanding their naming practices; whether the names they choose make sense, whether they are consistent, and whether they convey the information required of them. In this paper, we present IDEAL, a tool that will provide feedback to developers about their identifier naming practices. Among its planned features, it will support linguistic anti-pattern detection, which is what will be discussed in this paper. IDEAL is designed to, and will, be extended to cover further anti-patterns, naming structures, and practices in the near future. IDEAL is open-source and publicly available, with a demo video available at: https://youtu.be/fVoOYGe50zg

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Anthony Peruma, Venera Arnaoudova, Christian D. Newman. 2021-07-18. IDEAL: An Open-Source Identifier Name Appraisal Tool. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08344

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