An empirical study on Java method name suggestion: are we there yet?
This work provides insights into the performance of naming approaches for software developers, but it is incremental as it evaluates existing methods on a new dataset.
The paper conducted an empirical study on Java method name suggestion approaches, finding that current methods are accurate, with around 60% of accepted recommendations based on common prefixes like get, set, is, and test, and 19.3% derived from method bodies.
A large-scale evaluation for current naming approaches substantiates that such approaches are accurate. However, it is less known about which categories of method names work well via such naming approaches and how's the performance of naming approaches. To point out the superiority of the current naming approach, in this paper, we conduct an empirical study on such approaches in a new dataset. Moreover, we analyze the successful naming approaches above and find that: (1) around 60% of the accepted recommendation names are made on prefixes within get, set, is, and test. (2) A large portion (19.3%) of method names successfully recommended could be derived from the given method bodies. The comparisons also demonstrate the superior performance of the empirical study.