The Effects of Identifier Characteristics on Software Product Quality
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Background: Software projects consist of many identifiers, and how those identifiers
should be named to improve software product quality is an opinionated subject.
Some studies have tried to find the relation between identifiers characteristics and
software product quality, but these studies have been conducted on small sets of
software projects (N 12). Consequently, a need exists of large scale studies that
investigate how identifier characteristics effect and can be used as predictors of software
product quality.
Aim: This study evaluates if source file averages of the identifier characteristics
length, number of containing words, number of containing digits, and casing consistency
can predict the software product quality of source files.
Method: With identifier and software product quality data found in 60,315 source
files from 1,000 open-source Java software repositories, linear regression models are
fitted on the data. The models can then be evaluated in terms of accuracy and
coefficient importance to find if identifier characteristics could be used as predictors
of software product quality.
Results: Bayesian linear regression models with identifier characteristics and the
size of source files as independent variables had R-squared accuracies ranging from
0.008-0.545 of predicting the software product quality of source files. But, none
of the models’ identifier characteristics were accepted as important for the change
of the prediction based on the ROPE + HDI decision rule with a [-0.1,0.1] ROPE
interval.
Conclusions: The identifier characteristics investigated in the study could not be
used to predict the study’s measurement of software product quality. Further work is
needed in investigating the same identifier characteristics relation to other measures
of software product quality and with source files written in other programming
languages than Java.
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Identifier, characteristics, software, product, quality, empirical, software, engineering