I work at a large financial institution, and we are really bad at naming our internal applications. They usually end up as some four or five letter acronym of the process or problem. I’m sure others people have worked with application names like CAPS, MAPPS, TRAXS CRIMS and thought they suck.<p>So does anyone have a nice process for coming up with internal application names?
I was a 'corporate giant' a number of years ago and developing internal applications, and I always made a point of naming my applications with absolutely ridiculous names.<p>A script for calculating the rate of employee attrition (voluntary departure) in Human Resources was named the "Quantitative Attrition Calculator" or "QuAC" for short. The icon was a duck.<p>I always had a laugh when they said the name - some got the joke and loved it, which was great... but, even better was the one who "refused to be made a fool of" and would always make a point of saying the letters. (Bless her :) )<p>Just last year, I had to write some Customer Relationship Management Software - which brought back memories of Quac and I went with the name "Customer Relationship Management Interface" or "CRMI" the logo was a frog and the interface was green. It's not easy being green.<p>:)<p>My suggestion: make it as fun as you can.
With internal applications you likely won't have concerns about domain name availability, trademarks, etc., so how about a simple, plain English naming scheme, e.g., "Timesheet," "Expenses," "Inventory"?
Sets of animal names are always popular - I've worked with many Cobras and Eagles. Fierce animals such as snakes and birds of prey seem to come up often, particularly with business-facing applications.<p>My preferred technique is to come up with a catchy name, then derive a backronym for it that has some kind of connection to the process or problem. For instance, MACRAL could be the market and credit risk analysis library.
We once used the Latin names for constellations.<p>For example:<p>Pyxis -> "Compass"<p>Orion -> "Hunter"<p>There's usually a good mapping from the constellation name to a meta-feature of the app, for example, a large bloated app might be called Cetus (the whale).<p><a href="http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/const.html" rel="nofollow">http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/const.html</a>
I've used Star Wars planet names for quite a while, they sound good and most of them are pretty easy to remember.<p>You should check Wikipedia's list: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars_planets_(C%E2%80%93D)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars_planets_(C%E2...</a>
Wikipedia has a rather extensive list of greek mythological deities and mortals. Surely there is something appropriate in there ...
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_mythological_figures" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_mythological_figu...</a>
I asked a similar question here (<a href="http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/5887/how-do-you-choose-codenames-for-projects" rel="nofollow">http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/5887/how-do-you-choo...</a>). Hope it can help.
What about Culture Ship Names?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_%28The_Culture%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_%28The_Culture%29</a><p>Perhaps with acronyms for the longer ones e.g.<p>Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly (SAMWAF)
It's an old one, but I still think of it every time someone is trying to come up with an acronym: <a href="http://dilbert.com/fast/1993-06-23/" rel="nofollow">http://dilbert.com/fast/1993-06-23/</a>
One syllable, funny-sounding abbreviations. When an entire org is saying, writing, dreaming about the same thing -- make it memorable, efficient and as fun as it can be.
Pick whatever naming scheme comes to mind, but something that vaguely relates to the program's functionality + a degree of silliness makes the name easier to remember.
Moons of Saturn:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Saturn#Table_of_moons" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Saturn#Table_of_moons</a>
Sure. We usually come up with job titles describing the "human" equivalent of what function the application performs; e.g:<p>The Warden - an set of scripts to manage chroot jailed workers<p>The Middleman - a heavily customized MQ/ESB<p>The Coxswain - an app that monitors/controls system components