Abstract
Identifier names are the atoms of comprehension; weak identifier names decrease productivity by increasing the chance that developers make mistakes and increasing the time taken to understand chunks of code. Therefore, it is important to support developers in naming, and renaming, identifiers. In this paper, we study how terms in an identifier are changed during the application of rename refactorings and contextualize these changes using co-occurring refactorings and commit messages. The goal of this work is to understand how different development activities affect the type of changes applied to names during a rename. The results of this study can help researchers understand more about developers' naming habits and allow stronger support for assisting developers in determining when to rename and what words to use.
This study has been accepted for publication at The 19th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2019).
Artifacts
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