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Automatic identifier inconsistency detection using code dictionary

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Abstract

Inconsistent identifiers make it difficult for developers to understand source code. In particular, large software systems written by several developers can be vulnerable to identifier inconsistency. Unfortunately, it is not easy to detect inconsistent identifiers that are already used in source code. Although several techniques have been proposed to address this issue, many of these techniques can result in false alarms since such techniques do not accept domain words and idiom identifiers that are widely used in programming practice. This paper proposes an approach to detecting inconsistent identifiers based on a custom code dictionary. It first automatically builds a Code Dictionary from the existing API documents of popular Java projects by using an Natural Language Processing (NLP) parser. This dictionary records domain words with dominant part-of-speech (POS) and idiom identifiers. This set of domain words and idioms can improve the accuracy when detecting inconsistencies by reducing false alarms. The approach then takes a target program and detects inconsistent identifiers of the program by leveraging the Code Dictionary. We provide CodeAmigo, a GUI-based tool support for our approach. We evaluated our approach on seven Java based open-/proprietary- source projects. The results of the evaluations show that the approach can detect inconsistent identifiers with 85.4 % precision and 83.59 % recall values. In addition, we conducted an interview with developers who used our approach, and the interview confirmed that inconsistent identifiers frequently and inevitably occur in most software projects. The interviewees then stated that our approach can help to better detect inconsistent identifiers that would have been missed through manual detection.

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Notes

  1. http://goo.gl/p6Gzmd and http://goo.gl/7cCV8n

  2. http://www.dlib.vt.edu/projects/MarianJava/edu/vt/marian/server/status.java

  3. https://github.com/tangmatt/word-scramble/blob/master/system/Status.java

  4. Note that an identifier can include multiple inconsistencies. The total number of unique identifiers containing at least one inconsistency is 1,952.

  5. https://sites.google.com/site/detectinginconsistency/

  6. Apache Directory Project: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DIRSERVER-1140

  7. Apache Commons Math: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MATH-707

  8. Synonyms Definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonym

  9. Oxford Dictionary, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/

  10. Collins Cobuild Dictionary: http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english

  11. Dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/

  12. To define this map, any English dictionary can be used. In this paper, we used WordNet (2014) as described in Section 3.2.2.

  13. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=369942

  14. https://github.com/Chassis/memcache/issues/2

  15. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=108384

  16. https://github.com/scrom/Experiments/issues/32

  17. https://github.com/scrom/Experiments/commit/04dfbf7818626f9818379eb20e4c87e755407687

  18. https://github.com/morrisonlevi/Ardent/issues/17

  19. Although there are some of the researches on POS-tagging of source code elements (Abebe and Tonella 2010; Binkley et al. 2011; Guapa et al. 2013), they are not publicly available or also used natural language parser such as Minipar (2014), Stanford Log-linear Part-Of-Speech Tagger Toutanova et al. (2003). In this paper, we have adopted Stanford Parser (2014) because it is highly accurate for parsing natural language sentences and broadly used for NLP. In addition, it is publicly available, well-documented and stable.

  20. Decision of this threshold is carried out in the preliminary study.

  21. https://sites.google.com/site/detectinginconsistency/

  22. The Stanford Parser: A statistical parser (2014) has 86 % parsing precision for a sentence consisting of 40 English words.

  23. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-584

  24. Oxford Dictionary, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/

  25. Collins Cobuild Dictionary: http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english

  26. SCOWL: http://wordlist.aspell.net/

  27. Lexicon BadSmell Wiki: http://selab.fbk.edu/LexiconBadSmellWiki

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Acknowledgments

This paper was supported by research funds of Chonbuk National University in 2014. This research was supported by Next-Generation Information Computing Development Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (NRF-2014M3C4A7030505).

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Correspondence to Dongsun Kim.

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Communicated by: Giulio Antoniol

Appendix A: List of Domain Word POSes and Idioms

Appendix A: List of Domain Word POSes and Idioms

Table 13 Domain words with the dominant POS information extracted from the API document of projects with the parameter T W O = 100 and T P R = 0.8 ( indicates a word evaluated as invalid in the preliminary study. The precision is computed as 176/191 = 0.921)
Table 14 Idiom identifiers extracted from the API document of projects listed in Table 1, where T(F O f m w ) = 2, T(F O c l s ) = 2, T(F O a t t ) = 2, and T(F O m e t ) = 10

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Kim, S., Kim, D. Automatic identifier inconsistency detection using code dictionary. Empir Software Eng 21, 565–604 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-015-9369-5

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