An empirical study on Java method name suggestion: are we there yet?

TL;DR

This paper conducts an empirical evaluation of Java method name suggestion approaches, analyzing their effectiveness across different name categories and highlighting the factors contributing to successful recommendations.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale empirical analysis of naming approaches, identifying key patterns and the influence of method bodies on name suggestions.

Findings

60% of recommended names use common prefixes like get, set, is, test

19.3% of method names are derived from method bodies

Empirical study shows superior performance of current naming approaches

Abstract

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.