On expanding abbreviated identifiers in the source code

Abstract

Program comprehension is an important and difficult task in software development and evolution, which is costly and time-consuming. Some software abbreviated identifiers in the source code can further increase the difficulty of the program comprehension, especially for the junior developers who have less developing expertise for the software system. Moreover, a number of studies focused on applying information retrieval (IR) techniques to analyze the source code identifiers for various software maintenance tasks. These IR techniques would have difficulty in exploring abbreviations in the program. Hence, this paper proposes a novel approach to expand the abbreviations of software identifiers. The proposed approach searches the expansions of abbreviated identifiers considering the searching resources of the program and the Web. An empirical study has been evaluated and demonstrates that our approach can effectively recommend the expansions, which can not only help developers comprehend the program, but also assist IR techniques in further exploiting the natural language information in the program.