A very common problem I have seen in pretty much every code-base is lazy naming and it is costing you time and money every day.

What is lazy naming?

Lazy naming is a form of tech debt. It is the author throwing up their hands and saying "I don't really understand why I am making this code, so in order to complete the task I will give it a meaningless or generic name". This causes issues for everyone else as the name does not help the team with understanding and encourages other people to accept poor naming. This is a cause of application calcification.

Lets look at a couple types of lazy naming.

Grab-bag names

A grab-bag is a pile of mostly unrelated code. Sometimes those methods cannot even function on their without importing other code. Perhaps the author was tasked to move everything out of a big file and ran out of time so they created a grab-bag for all the stuff they didn't get to. Perhaps the author ran out of steam and wanted to get back to it later but it is still there a decade later.

An example here is ActiveRecord::Core. What is a Core? Who knows. What goes in a Core? Anything. Core is a module with a grab bag of methods that should be in other modules. This causes everyone to jump between files to follow code flows and complete tasks. You cannot use Core without every other ActiveRecord module. You also cannot use other ActiveRecord modules without Core. So, really, the extraction of ActiveRecord::Base into modules did nothing.

Solution: move what you can to other modules and what you cannot into the root class. Coherence is the name of the game here. If you cannot use a module outside its original context, then there was no point in making the module.

ThingDoer names

These are names where there is a clear purpose to the code contained within, but the author failed to use the name to inform future readers as to what to expect inside. This can accellerate purpose drift and feature creep.

Some common ThingDoer names: ThingProcessor, ThingHandler, ThingFunction.

Solution: Take a minute to try to describe the code in a few words. Perhaps your SaleProcessor could be a SaleDocumentIngestor. Perhaps your UsernamePasswordHandler could be UserAuthenticator.

Conclusion

Proper naming is key to ensuring that your application can continue to grow and change. Take the time to do it right.