DNN-disciplined natural naming: a method for systematic name creation in software development

Laitinen, Kari; Mukari, Timo

doi:10.1109/hicss.1992.183281

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Guidelines for using natural naming have with abbreviated names (b). been published by Keller (1990), Laitinen and Sepp~inen (1990), and Laitinen and Mukari (1992). As shown in Figure 1, natural naming means that abbreviations are avoided.…”

Section: Figure I the Same Program With Natural Names (A) Andmentioning

confidence: 95%

Estimating understandability of software documents

Laitinen¹

1996

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

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Software developers and maintainers need to read and understand source programs and other kinds of software documents in their work. Understandability of software documetlts is thus important. This paper introduces a method for estimating the understandability of software documents. The method is based on a language theory accorditzg to which ever T softwore document i.~ considered to contain a language of its own, which is a set of symbols. The understandability of documents written according to different documentation practices can be compared using the rules of the language theory. The method and the language theory are presented by usbtg source programs with different namhlg styles as example documents. The method can, at least theoretically, be applied to any kind of document, it can also be used to explain the benefits of some well-known software design methods.

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Section: Figure I the Same Program With Natural Names (A) Andmentioning

confidence: 95%

Estimating understandability of software documents

Laitinen¹

1996

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

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“…Textbooks on programming and software engineering usually state that descriptive names should be used. However, no instructions are given on how the names can be made descriptive and informative [10].…”

Section: General Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Laitinen and Mukari [10] show that judging the relevancy of names is a means for analyzing the problems of an application domain. It is thus relevant to presume that software developers, at least unconsciously, use naming as a thinking tool.…”

Section: Observations Related To Understanding Communication and Thmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As source programs are the most contaminated with abbreviations and they are developed and maintained in many software development organizations, we will study the problems related to abbreviations in the context of source programs. To avoid abbreviations, a principle called natural naming has been proposed [8,9,10]. Natural naming means that all names in source programs should be constructed using, preferably several, natural words of a natural language while respecting the grammatical rules of the natural language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Natural naming in software development: Feedback from practitioners

Laitinen

1995

Notes on Numerical Fluid Mechanics and Multidisciplinary Design

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During a five-year period several groups of software developers have been educated on using natural naming in software development. Generally, natural naming means avoiding abbreviations. In programming it means that program elements such as variables, tables, constants, and functions should be named using whole natural words and grammatical rules of a natural language. To assess the usefulness of natural naming and the importance of naming in general, we have requested the opinions of 52 software developers who have participated in naming courses or to whom a naming handbook has been introduced. The subjects had to judge the relevancy of 25 statements related to naming. The results of the inquiry indicate that most software developers, and especially the experienced ones, consider that natural naming facilitates their work.

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“…However there is substantial evidence that programmers find the concurrent specification of source code and the derivation of identifier names that are generally understandable by other programmers to be a difficult task. These difficulties result from cognitive limitations [3,4,5,19,22]; education issues [6,9,11,14,16,17,18,23]; cultural practices on the part of the programmer [2,6,12,19,25]; and cultural practices on the part of the programmer's management [7,13,19,21]. These same researchers suggest that programmer characteristics such as the number of years programming experience will influence the degree of difficulty experienced by the programmer in devising identifier names.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 91%

Tool assisted identifier naming for improved software readability: an empirical study

Relf

2005 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, 2005.

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This paper describes an empirical study investigating whether programmers improve the readability of their source code if they have support from a source code editor that offers dynamic feedback on their identifier naming practices.An experiment, employing both students and professional software engineers, and requiring the maintenance and production of software, demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in source code readability over that of the control.

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DNN-disciplined natural naming: a method for systematic name creation in software development

Cited by 4 publications

References 10 publications

Estimating understandability of software documents

Estimating understandability of software documents

Natural naming in software development: Feedback from practitioners

Tool assisted identifier naming for improved software readability: an empirical study

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