How students choose names: A replication study

Names of classes/methods/variables play an important role in code readability. To investigate how developers choose names, Feitelson et al. conducted an empirical survey and suggested a method to improve naming quality. We replicated their study, but limited the survey subjects to university students. Specifically, we conducted two experiments including 341 students from freshmen to seniors. The aim of the first experiment was to investigate the characteristics of the names given by students. The experimental results showed that the name length as well as the number of words contained in names increased with the grade and students have ambiguity in understanding variable names. The second experiment was to verify whether Feitelson et al.’s naming method can help improve the quality of the names given by students. The experimental results showed an improvement in naming quality for more than 67% of cases, which confirms the validity of the method for university students.