Supporting the Maintenance of Identifier Names: A Holistic Approach to High-Quality Automated Identifier Naming

A considerable part of the source code is identifier names-- unique lexical tokens that provide information about entities, and entity interactions, within the code. Identifier names provide human-readable descriptions of classes, functions, variables, etc. Poor or ambiguous identifier names (i.e., names that do not correctly describe the code behavior they are associated with) will lead developers to spend more time working towards understanding the code\u27s behavior. Bad naming can also have detrimental effects on tools that rely on natural language clues; degrading the quality of their output and making them unreliable. Additionally, misinterpretations of the code, caused by poor names, can result in the injection of quality issues into the system under maintenance. Thus, improved identifier naming increases developer effectiveness, higher-quality software, and higher-quality software analysis tools. In this dissertation, I establish several novel concepts that help measure and improve the quality of identifiers. The output of this dissertation work is a set of identifier name appraisal and quality tools that integrate into the developer workflow. Through a sequence of empirical studies, I have formulated a series of heuristics and linguistic patterns to evaluate the quality of identifier names in the code and provide naming structure recommendations. I envision and working towards supporting developers in integrating my contributions, discussed in this dissertation, into their development workflow to significantly improve the process of crafting and maintaining high-quality identifier names in the source code

The Love/Hate Relationship with the C Preprocessor: An Interview Study

The C preprocessor has received strong criticism in academia, among others regarding separation of concerns, error proneness, and code obfuscation, but is widely used in practice. Many (mostly academic) alternatives to the preprocessor exist, but have not been adopted in practice. Since developers continue to use the preprocessor despite all criticism and research, we ask how practitioners perceive the C preprocessor. We performed interviews with 40 developers, used grounded theory to analyze the data, and cross-validated the results with data from a survey among 202 developers, repository mining, and results from previous studies. In particular, we investigated four research questions related to why the preprocessor is still widely used in practice, common problems, alternatives, and the impact of undisciplined annotations. Our study shows that developers are aware of the criticism the C preprocessor receives, but use it nonetheless, mainly for portability and variability. Many developers indicate that they regularly face preprocessor-related problems and preprocessor-related bugs. The majority of our interviewees do not see any current C-native technologies that can entirely replace the C preprocessor. However, developers tend to mitigate problems with guidelines, even though those guidelines are not enforced consistently. We report the key insights gained from our study and discuss implications for practitioners and researchers on how to better use the C preprocessor to minimize its negative impact

Consolidation of Customized Product Copies into Software Product Lines

Copy-based customization is a widespread technique to serve individual customer needs with existing software solutions. To cope with long term disadvantages resulting from this practice, this dissertation developed an approach to support the consolidation of such copies into a Software Product Line with a future-compliant product base providing managed variability

Consolidation of Customized Product Copies into Software Product Lines

In software development, project constraints lead to customer-specific variants by copying and adapting the product. During this process, modifications are scattered all over the code. Although this is flexible and efficient in the short term, a Software Product Line (SPL) offers better results in the long term, regarding cost reduction, time-to-market, and quality attributes. This book presents a novel approach named SPLevo, which consolidates customized product copies into an SPL

A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection

Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache

Consolidation of Customized Product Copies into Software Product Lines

In software development, project constraints lead to customer-specific variants by copying and adapting the product. During this process, modifications are scattered all over the code. Although this is flexible and efficient in the short term, a Software Product Line (SPL) offers better results in the long term, regarding cost reduction, time-to-market, and quality attributes. This book presents a novel approach named SPLevo, which consolidates customized product copies into an SPL