Assessing Function Names and Quantifying the Relationship Between Identifiers and Their Functionality to Improve Them

Charis Charitsis, Chris Piech, John C. Mitchell

Abstract: When students first learn to program, they often focus on functionality: does a program work? In an era where software volume and complexity increase exponentially, it is equally important that they learn to write code with style. Quality code starts with the building blocks for any program, its functions. A carefully chosen name is vital for program maintainability and manageability. The identifier is the most portable and concise way to summarize what the function does. What makes for the right choice? And can we automatically assess the quality of function names? Using natural language processing, we were able to create a probabilistic model to evaluate their clarity. Using functionality encodings, we attempt to learn the relationship between functions in different programs to improve their names. We analyzed a total of 3,900 programs tackling three novice programming tasks submitted by 1,300 students in CS1.