Choose a Project Name and a Project Prefix

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
— Phil Karlton
https://www.karlton.org/2017/12/naming-things-hard/

A common joke in software development is that naming is hard. Having a name for something allows us to talk about it. You can name it, and everybody knows what you are talking about. Isn’t that great? A single word, and everybody can understand it. If it isn’t already part of our ubiquitous language, it might become one. So, let’s get started.

Recommendation

  1. Choose a name for your project that best reflects it.

  2. Choose a short abbreviation for your project, with at least three letters.

Rationale

If you think your project deserves a dedicated Maven project, then it also deserves its own name and namespace.
— Oliver B. Fischer

A good project name eases your communication and helps you avoid that people will call your project or its resulting artifacts differently. I have seen companies where people have been using different names for the same project, and this can lead to misunderstandings and confusion.

Furthermore, a well-established name also helps you search for it in case you have to look up some information in the systems of your organization. Therefore, I recommend finding, forming, and using a ubiquitous language for your project. This idea of having a unique, clear, and precise language should also be applied to your build system. You should consider it as the bounded context of your build.

For a fictitious billing system, a project name like Customer Billing System perfectly reflects what the system is doing. Everyone reading this name will have more or less an idea of what the system is doing.

The prefix based on your project name can be used as a prefix for your Maven properties and Maven coordinates. All these measures will help you later to find your Maven artifacts in your repository system (e.g. Nexus, Artifactory) much more easily. Even autocompletion becomes easier, as you only have to know the prefix to limit the suggestions to a reasonable amount.

Example

To illustrate this recommendation, let us have a look at the parent POM of a fictitious billing system for your customers.

Parent POM of a fictive Billing System
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>com.amce.systems.cbs</groupId> (2)
    <artifactId>cbs-parent</artifactId> (2)
    <version>0.1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <name>Customer Billing System</name> (1)
    <packaging>pom</packaging>

    <properties>
        <cbs.mylib.version>18303.29.3</cbs.mylib.version> (3)
        <skipTests>false</skipTests>
    </properties>

    <modules>
        <module>cbs-domain</module> (4)
        <module>cbs-domain-logic</module>
        <module>cbs-infrastructure</module>
    </modules>
</project>
1 The name Customer Billing System gives the project a unique name and serves as a source for the abbreviation cbs
2 cbs willbe also used in the Maven coordinates of the project to make the name of the artifact unique within your Maven artifact universe
3 cbs will be also used as a common prefix for all project specific Maven properties, to differentiate them from properties used by plugins for Maven and Maven itself
4 Also, each Maven module will use the same prefix to ensure that it has a unique name for the module

See also