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Debugging Method Names

  • Conference paper
ECOOP 2009 – Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5653))

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Abstract

Meaningful method names are crucial for the readability and maintainability of software. Existing naming conventions focus on syntactic details, leaving programmers with little or no support in assuring meaningful names. In this paper, we show that naming conventions can go much further: we can mechanically check whether or not a method name and implementation are likely to be good matches for each other. The vast amount of software written in Java defines an implicit convention for pairing names and implementations. We exploit this to extract rules for method names, which are used to identify “naming bugs” in well-known Java applications. We also present an approach for automatic suggestion of more suitable names in the presence of mismatch between name and implementation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Norwegian Computing Center, Norway

    Einar W. Høst & Bjarte M. Østvold

Authors
  1. Einar W. Høst
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  2. Bjarte M. Østvold
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Imperial College London, 180 Queen’s Gate, SW7 2AZ, London, UK

    Sophia Drossopoulou

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Høst, E.W., Østvold, B.M. (2009). Debugging Method Names. In: Drossopoulou, S. (eds) ECOOP 2009 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5653. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03013-0_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03013-0_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03012-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-03013-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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