IDEAL: An Open-Source Identifier Name Appraisal Tool

TL;DR

IDEAL is an open-source tool designed to analyze and improve identifier naming practices in code by detecting linguistic anti-patterns, aiding developers in writing clearer, more consistent, and self-descriptive code.

Contribution

The paper introduces IDEAL, a novel open-source tool that provides feedback on naming practices and detects linguistic anti-patterns in code identifiers.

Findings

Supports linguistic anti-pattern detection

Open-source and publicly available

Provides feedback to improve code readability

Abstract

Developers must comprehend the code they will maintain, meaning that the code must be legible and reasonably self-descriptive. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of research and tooling that supports developers in understanding their naming practices; whether the names they choose make sense, whether they are consistent, and whether they convey the information required of them. In this paper, we present IDEAL, a tool that will provide feedback to developers about their identifier naming practices. Among its planned features, it will support linguistic anti-pattern detection, which is what will be discussed in this paper. IDEAL is designed to, and will, be extended to cover further anti-patterns, naming structures, and practices in the near future. IDEAL is open-source and publicly available, with a demo video available at: https://youtu.be/fVoOYGe50zg