A Quantitative Investigation of Trends in Confusing Variable Pairs Through Commits: Do Confusing Variable Pairs Survive?
Pages 90 - 99
Abstract
Programmers can make the variables easy to understand by choosing meaningful names. However, even though individual names are meaningful, a collection of them might adversely affect the code readability when their names are highly similar, such as “bottomRight” vs. “bottomHeight,” and they may cause mixing up or misreading of variables. Such a pair is referred to as a “confusing variable pair.” This paper conducts a large-scale investigation to examine the change trends of confusing variable pairs over commits, and it reports the following findings. (1) The average number of confusing variable pairs appearing in a source file is 1.4 in Java and 1.3 in Python. (2) About 67–75% of confusing variable pairs survive through commits. (3) Confusing variable pairs tend to appear in a subset of source files within a project (the median rates in Java and Python projects: 26% and 13%) and disappear from fewer files (the median rates in Java and Python projects: 6% and 2%). (4) Although the change trends do not vary among projects, some outlier projects have significantly more confusing variable pairs.
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- A Quantitative Investigation of Trends in Confusing Variable Pairs Through Commits: Do Confusing Variable Pairs Survive?
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June 2024
728 pages
ISBN:9798400717017
DOI:10.1145/3661167
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Published: 18 June 2024
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EASE 2024
EASE 2024: 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
June 18 - 21, 2024
Salerno, Italy
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