As part of our larger project on API Usability, we have studied the issue of naming of methods, classes and parameters. It can definitely have a measurable impact.
At one point, we tried to design an experiment to test the hypothesis that there was a "sweet spot" in terms of the length of the name -- not too short and not too long, but we never were able to separate the length from the semantics of the words. However, we did report on names that were clearly too long in the SAP eSOA API. And we identified naming as a key aspect of the design that an API designer must take into account in our taxonomy of design issues. Another study showed that people often navigate an API by guessing names first, and you should reserve the most general name (like "File") for classes that people actually use, instead of the current common practice of using the general name for an interface or top-level class that is never actually used, except as a superclass for what people actually are supposed to use. These results are not collected in one place, however, and are distributed throughout our papers. References for the papers that report on all of these are here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/apiusability.html Brad Myers -----Original Message----- From: Raoul Duke [mailto:rao...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, March 26, 2012 6:09 PM To: Ppig-Discuss-List Subject: Re: studies of naming? hi, > Check out my paper from PPIG 2006: > http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/abegel/papers/ppig-naming.pdf Thanks, I just skimmed it. I probably haven't explained well at all what I had in mind. I searched for "bug" and "error" with no hits. It so far appears to me to be a review of how naming is used; doesn't get into the resulting impacts of those uses and choices. Now that I think about it, I guess the sort of thing I have in mind is: has anybody somehow managed to study a bug database and the fixes and figure out %ages of what caused the bugs, and if it is possible to figure out that naming was a problem, how much was due to problems with naming? I guess it would be quite hard to tease it out. Presumably naming hasn't caused Arianne to crash or anything like that (http://www.sans.org/top25-software-errors/) so I'm really probably only ranting about my own little pet peeve. Apologies. sincerely. -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
