How do you name your projects?

Question

At work we're having issues with different people wanting/suggesting different names for a new project. It's changed 4 times in the last 2 days.

What processes do people go through when naming internal projects? How do you work as a team to come to a conclusion for a project name?

To make this a little clearer, the question is HOW do you name your projects, not what do you name them. I'm more on about a process so we don't get the 3/4 managers involved spending the next 4 weeks changing the name of the project every 4 hours

Answer 1

Have everyone put their suggestions in a hat, and pull a name at random. Does it really matter?

Answer 2

It really depends on how saddled with a name you will be.
For instance if its a .Net project, you will be quite stuck with the name you choose, in which case the projects usually get a really boring naming, even if the site has a nice naming.

In other technologies where there is no "manifest" to the code, named as a project, and moving the code to a new folder name is the "project" then witty names seems to be great fun.

Answer 3

One company I was with named all their projects according to vacation city names. So we had Paris, Athens, etc. I've also used greek gods and constellations. There wasn't much of a process to it, just whatever the development team thought was cool. Though there was an instance where we allowed our beta partner at the time to pick the name of the project - they had a whole contest and everything.

Another project I was on had four phases: Red, Green, Blue, and 4

Gotta love that.

Answer 4

We name them after asimov characters.

The blackjack client was Hari.

Answer 5

Why is the team choosing the name. Don't you have a manager? That's how organizations are supposed to work: if one level can't achieve the goal in a timely manner, escalate it up to the next level.

What a colossal waste of time!

Answer 6

Use letters to indicate versions of your product, and have team members vote on words that start with the letters.

We've had one project that was named Ambition, Benevolence, Charisma, etc.

I like to use Instant Runoff Voting for this.

I've also found that having new team members suggest names helps them feel ownership for the project.

Answer 7

Make a list of all potential names, each person only gets to make one name suggestion. Have everyone vote on the names. Each person can vote only once, and not for their own name.

Answer 8

For my personal projects I name them after Revolutionary War battles (e.g. Lexington, Concord, Saratoga, Ticonderoga). I'm also fond of using names from Greek mythology since I'm a big fan of that :)

Another personal project was named Rushmore (as in Mt. Rushmore). IMO it all depends on what you fancy and whether or not the project name is going to be publicly visible. If it's not, then name it whatever you want (the more mysterious the better if you ask me!) but if it will be public then choose something that doesn't sound ridiculous or will make people go "Huh?". Project Fig Newton or Project Twinkie might sound funny to a group of devs, but how will it sound to customers?

Answer 9

Name your projects in a way that helps developers know what they are when you put the under source control. Outside of your current source control it doesn't matter what people call it.

Try to pick a naming convention that stays the same it will help organize things in your source control and try to stay away from initials and abbreviations because once all the DEVs on that project leave no one will know what the project is.

Try sticking to names like: customerA Website customerB WinApp

Answer 10

One place I worked used mountains for the framework, and ski resorts for the client; Another used tube stations. In both cases they were internal names that didn't have a fixed version number (as marketing had a habit of changing that)

Answer 11

I've seen architects choose, CTOs mandate, dev teams rota, and a reward for some arbitrary competition but ultimately it comes down to one man with one vote. You can democratise that any way you want, but whatever you do just make sure it's inoffensive and you stick to it.

Fwiw, my favourite system has been the architect who chose Judge Dredd characters. :D

Answer 12

For personal projects I sometimes use names of big cities, like New York, Berlin, Tokyo etc. It' both convenient since I feel the project isn't bound to a specific technology or function and can involve into whatever it might be, while at the same time it can be a bit difficult remembering if it was Tokyo or Oslo which was doing "that" cool thing..

At work we have a tradition for more simple and descriptive names. For instance an application that uploads files according to a schedule is called ScheduledFileUploader. And then there's FileOrganizer, MailSender, DiskSpaceMonitor et.c..

Answer 13

you mean a code name? since its gonna stick only in the minds of internal employees, we usually named it the first thing we thought of and we never put it up for discussion, one project we had named "Dough" seriously! :) and it worked like magic, anything works

Answer 14

My big brother Mikael has been called to some firefighting in very late projects which...he chose some movie titles

• Save Willy - a bloated java project
• Harry Potter - a architectural disaster java project

Answer 15

1. Have the team make many suggestions.
2. Have management and Legal weed out the problematic names.
3. Have the team vote on the remaining names.

Answer 16

• Female names (everybody likes a nice name, specially if it brings nice memories)
• Animals (everybody likes animals)

We usually agree very fast on this one, no problems there. After we have named something, for example, "chipmunk", the jokes and funny pictures start to arrive (everybody likes making up jokes :)

But really, I don't think it makes a difference.

Answer 17

Name your projects after constellations. There are plenty to choose from, most sound cool. Also when you get to the Aries project, you can tell people that you're checking the cell structure and the cell structure has been checked.

Answer 18

With great care and a lot of personal pain. I quite frankly obsess about my personal project names. Even to the point that I will spend hours thinking about the name of a particular type or DLL.

Sadly this is not a joke.

Answer 19

No project names, just version numbers.

Everybody knows that if you released "MyBlaPro 4" you are working on "MyBlaPro 5" and it is going to be out in 1-2 years (your company history can offer a hint on the length of your dev. cycles). The big secret is not that you are working on the next version, but when it is out.

Code names confuse not only outsiders (think Avalon/WPF, Longhorn/XP/2000/Vista/7) but also insiders. You can sometimes hear discussions like this "no, we added X in Zimfandel, before Cabernet" "no, you are wrong, Cabernet was 5, Zimfandel was 6, but X was added in Merlot"

Add to the mess the half-outsiders. Think localization companies that have to reuse memory translations between versions ("for Rainier we should use the memory from Shasta, or from Whitney?").