Abstract:
Understanding software programs is very difficult and time consuming. Identifier names
have an important role in the source code, so it is an important part of enhancing comprehensibility. Many studies have demonstrated that using meaningful identifier names
can improve the comprehensibility of programs. However, most of the naming conventions are rather general. We believe that more specific naming recommendations may be
needed depending on the different cases. In this thesis, we investigated 745,651 identifier
names from 100 open source Python projects from 6 different domains. We explored the
connection between naming conventions and 9 naming practices and their differences in
different contexts, such as loop statements, the size of scopes and different domains. Our
results show that the use of identifier names does vary across cases. Making more detailed
naming conventions based on different cases can help programmers to choose names that
more accurately describe the concept of identifiers and thus improve comprehensibility.