Identifying class name inconsistency in hierarchy: a first simple heuristic

Giving good class names is an important task. Good programmers often report that they take several attempts to find an adequate one. Often programmers do not name consistently classes within a package, project or hierarchy. This is a problem because it hampers understanding the systems. In this article we present a simple heuristic (a distribution) to characterise class naming. We combine such a heuristic with structural information to identify inconsistent class names. In addition, we use this simple heuristic to give packages a shape. We applied such heuristic to 285 packages in Pharo to identify misnamed classes. Some of these misnamed classes are reported and discussed here.