Why you should care

You may think naming conventions are purely cosmetic, and you’re not completely wrong. However, this is a signature of a mature development team who writes good software. If theses simple rules are not applied, what about the rest? Like in English where a sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop, naming conventions help developers read code easier and faster.

Business Impacts

Cost

CAST Recommendations

Static code analysis tools can help your development teams identify this code insight, while modern IDEs propose to automatically rename identifiers across a software project.

References

https://www.thoughtco.com/using-java-naming-conventions-2034199
https://google.github.io/styleguide/javaguide.html#s5.1-identifier-names

Style Guide

How we detect

This code insight verifies the ratio between cases where naming conventions for attributes, classes and methods are not applied to the total number of identifiers of this kind. Based on thresholds CAST has defined by analyzing software over the last 25 years, Highlight counts penalty points to the source file.

Examples for Java:
– Classes should be in CamelCase: start with an uppercase, first letter of each next word starting with an uppercase
– Methods should be in mixed case: start with lowercase, first letter of each next word starting with an uppercase

About CAST and Highlight’s Code Insights

Over the last 25 years, CAST has leveraged unique knowledge on software quality measurement by analyzing thousands of applications and billions of lines of code. Based on this experience and community standards on programming best practices, Highlight implements hundreds of code insights across 15+ technologies to calculate health factors of a software.

See features How it works