Developers must comprehend the code they will maintain, meaning that the code must be legible and reasonably self-descriptive. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of research and tooling that supports developers in understanding their naming practices; whether the names they choose make sense, whether they are consistent, and whether they convey the information required of them. In this paper, we present IDEAL, a tool that will provide feedback to developers about their identifier naming practices. Among its planned features, it will support linguistic anti-pattern detection, which is what will be discussed in this paper. IDEAL is designed to, and will, be extended to cover further anti-patterns, naming structures, and practices in the near future. IDEAL is open-source and publicly available, with a demo video available at: https://youtu.be/fVoOYGe50zg
Details around setting up and using IDEAL are available here.
The results of our evaluation of IDEAL is available here.
Examples of naming violations currently detected by IDEAL are available here.
Details around the architecture of IDEAL is available here.
If you are using IDEAL in your research, please cite the following paper:
Anthony Peruma, Venera Arnaoudova, and Christian D. Newman, "IDEAL: An Open-Source Identifier Name Appraisal Tool," 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2021), Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, September 27 - October 1, 2021.