Section 3.6. Naming Projects and Machines


3.6. Naming Projects and Machines

This section contains ideas for choosing names for projects and names for computers. Planning all these things in advance may seem excessively controlling to some people, but in my experience, deciding on this information once, before things are done differently by each person, will help project members communicate clearly.

3.6.1. Choosing Project Names

Project names are usually chosen by engineering groups, with one name for each significantly different version of the products that they are working on. There should be no need to change a project's name once it has been chosen. Product names, on the other hand, are the names that customers see, and these names are usually chosen to help a product sell or to become popular. Product names can change at the whim of a market research poll or a new VP of Sales.

Some general guidelines for choosing names for projects are:


Keep it short

Since project names may appear in filenames or source code, shorter project names are preferable; four to six characters is common. Longer names will only be abbreviated anyway, and usually in two different ways.


Use distinctive sounds

Project names should sound different from each other when spoken aloud by people whose native language is not the one used by the rest of the group. Even if everyone speaks English, having two projects named "ctest" and "seebest" is too close for comfort.


Use low-frequency letters

It's much easier to be confident that all references to a project name can be found if the name contains characters that are less common in the local language. This is a good argument for choosing project names that use unusual characters, such as the letters q and z for English.

A few years ago there was a project named IDS that apparently had a function named IDSConnect. Then the project was renamed DIS and all its functions were renamed accordingly, which led to their function for creating connections being renamed to DISConnect. The letters d, i, and s are too common in English to simply reuse them in such an anagram.


Make it unmarketable

Sometimes a project name will be reused as a product name, but not if it is already trademarked, or if you make it odd or crude enough!

Project names don't have to have a theme, though that can be fun. They don't even have to be meaningful, just memorable with an obvious way of pronouncing the word. You can choose a number of suitable names once and then let people decide which one they want to use next. Names of stars, types of sushi, rare diseases, and characters from comic books are some ideas to start with for project names.

3.6.2. Choosing Machine Names

What you call different machines might seem to be of little consequence until you remember that you'll type the names of frequently used machines many, many times. Choosing a different theme for firewalls, servers, testbed machines, printers, and people's individual machines will make it easier to identify machines from their names. Google Sets can help you find groups of names. The most appropriate names that I have seen used were for two printers: chainsaw and clearcut, which describe what printers do to forests quite well! Among the worst names I have seen were for two servers: left and right, for their locations in the original server room. You can guess where they ended up when the server room was rearranged later on.

There are actually two official RFCs on this subject ("Requests for Comments" or RFCs are the oddly named standards for how the Internet works; see http://www.rfc-editor.org). "Choosing a Name for Your Computer" (RFC 1178) has plenty of good advice. A few of my favorite suggestions from it are excerpted here (with my comments in square brackets):


Don't overload other terms already in common use

. . . One machine was named "up", as it was the only one that accepted updates. Conversations would sound like this: "Is up down?" and "Boot the machine up" followed by "Which machine?" . . .


Don't use your own name

. . . It is especially tempting to name your first computer after yourself, but think about it. Do you name any of your other possessions after yourself? No. Your dog has its own name, as do your children. If you are one of those who feel so inclined to name your car and other objects, you certainly don't reuse your own name. Otherwise you would have a great deal of trouble distinguishing between them in speech. . . .

[I would add: unless you can be absolutely sure that when the machine is reassigned, its name will be changed.]


Don't use long names

. . . Experience has shown that names longer than eight characters simply annoy people. . . .


Don't use digits at the beginning of the name

Many programs accept a numerical Internet address as well as a name. Unfortunately, some programs do not correctly distinguish between the two and may be fooled, for example, by a string beginning with a decimal digit.

Names consisting entirely of hexadecimal digits, such as "beef", are also problematic, since they can be interpreted entirely as hexadecimal numbers as well as alphabetic strings. [Though I've never seen a real problem due to this.]


Don't expect case to be preserved

. . . Convention dictates that computer names appear all lowercase. . . .

The other RFC on this subject is "The Naming of Hosts" (RFC 2100), an amusing variation on T. S. Eliot's "The Naming of Cats."



Practical Development Environments
Practical Development Environments
ISBN: 0596007965
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 150

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net