Recommending verbs for rename method using association rule mining

Abstract

An identifier is one of the crucial elements for program readability. Method names in an object-oriented program are important identifiers because method names are used for understanding the behavior of the methods without reading a part of the program. It is well-known that each method name should consist of a verb and objects according to general guidelines. However, it is not easy to name methods consistently since each of the developers may have a different understanding of the verbs and objects used in the method names. As a first step to enable developers to name methods consistently and easily, we focus on the verbs used in the method names. In this paper, we present a technique to recommend candidate verbs for a method name so that developers can use consistent verbs for method names. Given a method, we recommend a list of verbs used in many other methods similar to the given method, by using association rules. We have extracted association rules from 445 OSS projects and applied these rules to two projects. As a result, the extracted rules could recommend the current verbs in the top 10 candidates for 60.6% of the methods covered by our approach. Furthermore, we have identified four meaningful groups of rules for verb recommendation.