ESEIW 2025
Sun 28 September - Fri 3 October 2025
Fri 3 Oct 2025 16:06 - 16:33 at Kaiulani II - Program Comprehension and Review 2 Chair(s): Chris Brown

Research scientists increasingly rely on implementing software to support their research. While previous research has examined the impact of identifier names on program comprehension in traditional programming environments, limited work has explored this area in scientific software, especially regarding the quality of method names in the code. The recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities for automating code analysis tasks, such as identifier name appraisals and recommendations. Our study evaluates four popular LLMs on their ability to analyze grammatical patterns and suggest improvements for 496 method names extracted from Python-based Jupyter Notebooks. Our findings show that the LLMs are somewhat effective in analyzing these method names and generally follow good naming practices, like starting method names with verbs. However, their inconsistent handling of domain-specific terminology and only moderate agreement with human annotations indicate that automated suggestions require human evaluation. This work provides foundational insights for improving the quality of scientific code through AI automation.

Fri 3 Oct

Displayed time zone: Hawaii change

15:40 - 17:00
Program Comprehension and Review 2ESEM - Emerging Results and Vision Track / at Kaiulani II
Chair(s): Chris Brown Virginia Tech
15:40
26m
Talk
Dealing with SonarQube Cloud: Initial Results from a Mining Software Repository Study
ESEM - Emerging Results and Vision Track
Sabato Nocera University of Salerno, Davide Fucci Blekinge Institute of Technology, Giuseppe Scanniello University of Salerno
16:06
26m
Talk
Exploring Large Language Models for Analyzing and Improving Method Names in Scientific Code
ESEM - Emerging Results and Vision Track
Gunnar Larsen University of Hawaii at Manoa, Carol Wong University of Hawaii at Manoa, Anthony Peruma University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Pre-print
16:33
26m
Talk
Identifier Name Similarities: An Exploratory Study
ESEM - Emerging Results and Vision Track
Carol Wong University of Hawaii at Manoa, Mai Abe University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Silvia De Benedictis University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Marissa Halim University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Anthony Peruma University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa