Authors
Guangjie Li, Hui Liu, Ally S Nyamawe
Publication date
2020/4/16
Source
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Volume
53
Issue
2
Pages
1-38
Publisher
ACM
Description
More than 70% of characters in the source code are used to label identifiers. Consequently, identifiers are one of the most important source for program comprehension. Meaningful identifiers are crucial to understand and maintain programs. However, for reasons like constrained schedule, inexperience, and unplanned evolution, identifiers may fail to convey the semantics of the entities associated with them. As a result, such entities should be renamed to improve software quality. However, manual renaming and recommendation are fastidious, time consuming, and error prone, whereas automating the process of renamings is challenging: (1) It involves complex natural language processing to understand the meaning of identifers; (2) It also involves difficult semantic analysis to determine the role of software entities. Researchers proposed a number of approaches and tools to facilitate renamings. We present a …
Total citations
202120222023467
Scholar articles
G Li, H Liu, AS Nyamawe - ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 2020