We choose the boring - 'what it does' way :(
Though I think I'll start to name my projects after 80's pop groups - 'SpandauBallet', 'IggyPop' etc :)

We use brands of beer. Belgian beer, of course.

Google Sets is a relevant tool for this type of activity:

http://labs.google.com/sets

We choose acronyms from the things it should do. I tried to change that and tried Albert(Discworld character, Death's assistant) on a new project, but it was changed to a hard pronounceble camel case word. :(

I've always thought that if I had a chance to name a project I would name it after weapons... preferably legendary ones. Well, actually ordinary weapons that sound cool or click well with the rest would work as well. I'm not sure if it would sound militaristic though.

Shipping regions. Guaranteed to resonate with anyone who's ever listened to BBC Radio 4 or the BBC World Service.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_Forecast#Region_names

Characters from The Simpsons.

http://www.thesimpsons.com/characters/home.htm

Get one word to describe what it does and then translate it into Cornish, et voila, a unique, nearly pronouncable name.

I like the Shipping Regions one.

Last names of famous fictional detectives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detective_fiction#Famous_fictional_detectives)

Philosphers (could get tricky - no one wants to get stuck on Project Camus or Nietzsche)

Famous Scientists

Star Wars characters (Again, some names could be jinxed. Project Fett - that's doomed for the Sarlaac pit, for sure.)

what about girl names?

Two sets I have used. The element names: carbon, helium, lithium, etc. Celestial bodies: Jupiter, Triton, Andromeda, etc. I once named a series of servers after the planets but quickly ran out of names. That list is even shorter now that Pluto has fallen off the list.

Company I worked for had the most ludicrous names for their internal projects.
Data converter was called "Jehova" as it had its "witnesses" (plugins for different data types), while animation tool was called "closet" because, yes, it worked with "skeletons" (animated, that is). And many, many more

Branching out into naming schemes in general (i.e. not specific for projects)

A company I worked for used the box-o-crayons method for naming servers: they took a large box of crayons that had the colors listed and named their servers after it, in no particular order. ("the white is our CVS box, the red is a testing box, etc").

All machines that get to live in my home get named after the capitals of US states, in alphabetical order of the state.

I have also used (for small numbers of boxes) 6-lettter scientists (Kelvin, Darwin) and space crafts/mission programs. (Sputnik, Apollo).

Stations on a (local) rail network works nicely too. (e.g. London Underground)

Sadly we only use the final product names (if already known) or description of what the product will do (or acronyms of this).

I vote for rockalbums or sweets for the start.

But how about combinations of two sets, to make it cooler, this could lead to names like "firefox" :-P

Interestingly, your strategy for naming projects is very similar to the shadowy "Bureau"'s strategy for naming secret missions in Adam Hall's "Quiller" novels...

Personally, I've never needed to name a project, but I like naming machines. At Warwick Uni, different clusters of machines would have related names, so all the Sparc ELC/SLCs back in my day were Onyx, Marble, Flint, and so on, whereas the room of colour graphics stations all just ended with "-ind": woodwind, downwind, tamarind... Much nicer than this dull company I work for now, where everything is RLYDULNME04938 or whatever.

At Warwick, there was a suggestion to name a group of machines after dead rockstars (mostly so you could get the dialogue "ping Elvis"/"Elvis is alive"), but it never came to fruition, unfortunately.

How about aartoon characters - from a single show to keep the set tight. And as much as I like the shows, be more creative than Kyle, Stan... or Bart, Lisa...

I used to work for a large company where one IT guy joked that every project must start with Step One: Choosing a clever acronym. He was making a good point - it was ridiculous, the extent to which project teams would go to get a catchy name.

Naming projects and naming servers have a lot in common. In view of which, there are two extremely pertinent RFCs:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2100.html

I prefer the second.

We have a project manager that's really into cyclists, so a number of our projects have been famous bikers. I tried for star wars references once, but nobody got it...

We use marsupial names. We end up with some funny sounding names that no one understands, and that is how we like it. We have Numbat, Dibbler, Wombat, Koala, and Opossum just to name a few.

Character from shows. My servers are named after characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and my workgroup is called Sunnydale.

I wound up naming my computers after the first names of Italian bike racers that started with the letter 'f': felice, fausto, francesco, fabio. But when I had enough of this silly scheme, I named the last one fini.

Er... I use identity(1,1) prefixed by "project ". Although using the prefix is optional...

In France we use the wine category a lot...

We mostly use acronyms or short phrases...nothing too long, just two or three words to briefly describe what it does (PlanTracker, LeadGeneration, ProjectEvaluation, etc). Occasionally, an area of our company will develop a system that they want a "really good" name for, so there will be a post on our intranet site stating that you can submit your idea for the system name and the winner will get $250 (sometimes more). They will give a brief description of what the system does so you can come up with something decent.

Most of the time though, it's up to the programmer in charge to come up with the name. The business area usually only cares about what is displayed in the header of the page when they get to it.

Hey, I wrote on this exact thing last week - http://whygosolo.com/posts/26 - and we went with Explorer Names since we're in new territory and bucking convention.

It took awhile to catch on, but we name our projects by where we go to eat for lunch during the kickoff. Chipotle, Pollo, Wildwings, Bankok to name a few.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article which follows up on the excellent old Salon "Name Game" piece:

http://www.dansdata.com/sillynames.htm

I wanted to know how the companies mentioned in it - the ones being given weird expensive names, and the ones doing the naming - fared.

The results pretty much confirmed my prejudices :-).

We tend to work off a new set of names every year (helps to get an approx. age of a long running proj.)

The last three years have been:
Egyptian Gods
Knights of the Round Table
Traditional Martial Arts Weapons

Of course, then they get renamed to something boring before release to the business...

At Telligent we've had internal Community Server releases with names like Mentos, Morpheus, and a few others.

Our reporting solution (built by our interns originally) was initially referred to internally as TattleTale.

Our company just code-named our latest project: Predator, after the character of the movie.

We were just goofing around when we came up with that name, but later realized that the project, which we intend to aggressively compete with other similar systems, was an excellent fit. The system finds things and in this case, a Predator hunts things. Weird how that works out.

I'm using characters from video games I played as a kid. Right now I'm using the Mario series. Mario, Luigi, Peach, Toad, Bowser, Yoshi, ... Then I'll use another video game series or maybe just mix them all up and go in no order. Sonic, Tails, Zelda, Link, Leonardo, Splinter, Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Kirby. If I ever run out, I'll just go to the endless Pokemon list.

We also used female names in our projects.
The three developers all lived on Betty Drive at the time, and that neighborhood was full of female names, so the project names turned out to be the same:
Server product: Sally (not sure where we got this one)
Client product: Cindy (the littlest)
Next version server product: Betty (as in Betty Page/'betty' in surfer slang = the ultimate babe!)

We thought about using the three Brady girls names, but no one wanted to name the next version after the oldest, because whenever we would go off talking about it, management would get annoyed and say 'Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!'... :-)

I must be really under estimating the value of a name... however...
Why not let the group come up with it themselves? Gives them ownership.

Having a central registry of project names would benefit everyone in the company (as a dictionary) and could link to the project documentation.
This would also insure that the name is unique.

The problem I have with project name is that different people around the company all reference it with different terms....
like 'everest' is really '3.0' or the 'performance' project.

The REAL problem I have with names is keeping them all straight!

Project names are all well and good but a more important aspect to software development is the final name and the practice of swtiching project names. Should the actual software project code include names? For example, should the actual solution file be called "Gobstopper.sln"? What about directories? Does the application get installed into the Gobstopper directory?

I've been on multiple projects that have had project names which ended up in the code/directories/architecture somehow and then got changed by either a buyout or a zealous marketer. Now you are stuck trying to explain to the customer why every Java Jar file starts with Gobstopper or why they need to use the Gobstopper user ID to log in to the database when the application is now called "Accounting 2008".

I'd love to hear how people are handling this in the industry. If the project name is Gobstopper does this name appear anywhere in the code/installation/architecture?

We have just finished a long cycle of projects all named somehow after sharks:

<ul>
<li>Jaws</li>
<li>Hammerhead</li>
<li>Mako</li>
</ul>

I am contemplating between apes and muscle cars for the next cycle now.

Our internal projects and release names are named after songs people can identify with. The names are usually neutral, and well.. music is an endless source of inspiration.

Porn stars, naturally.

One company has lately used cities and civilizations as project names, but they tend to pick failed cities and civilizations. Perhaps this is due to the names sounding cool and people not knowing history? Or, perhaps it is recognition of the rate of project failure.

I love brands of beer for server names.

Piggybacking somewhat on the colors theme, how about the colors of Crayola Crayons? Atomic Tangerine is just crying out for a project!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Crayola_crayon_colors

If you can people from fighting over regional preferences: cities, states, and countries work well. The majority are 1 word, and most people know how to pronounce and spell most of them.

Colors fits the scheme as well but I find that using adjectives gets confusing.

My current project is going by things related to sailing/boats
Gale/Breeze/Squall/Zephyr
and the side projects are Cartographer/Compass/Periscope
and the little testbed i uses is Titanic.

You already had one we used: National Parks. We also tried natural disasters for a while ... Mt St Helens, Tanguska ;-)

Hey Now Jeff,
I like the idea of one word names.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto

We use a method similar to Microsoft.

[company].[codegroup].[typeofcode].[codename]

so we might have something like:
Blob.Forms.AwesomeTextBoxOfDoom
Blob.DataAccess.SQL.NightlyAutoUpdater

We decided to just be completely random. That's why we make use of our CAPTCHA solver. Currently, we point it to codinghorror's CAPTCHA. Of course, our last 10 projects have been named orange...

We are currently using Marvel comic characters.

At my last job we used house names from George R. R. Martin's The Song of Ice and Fire series. Who knows if they kept the convention after I left.

This may be a little overboard, but do you have enough Trading Card Game types over there that you could start naming them after card names, from like Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic the Gathering?

I was using Yugi names for the various public releases during the beta phase of the project. The name tied into the ATK value of a particular fiend at the time (nobody except me probably noticed, but who cares 8^D) It was always seemed to drive up a little more interest when you said that the "Versago Release" (Beta 0.3) or "Kozaky Release" (Beta 0.4).

As for more naming suggestions, Lord of the Rings Characters/Locations are particularly nice. Easier projects get the obligatory "Rivendell" while those daunting ones can have "Mordor" 8^D

We considered a number of different naming groups for system rewrites at my work. I was partial to alcohols (Don Julio, Stoli, Ketel); other groupings we considered included stooges related (tho our servers were already named after 3 stooges and rascals characters), nerd themed (manga, gnu), horror films (cujo, creepshow, videodrome), comedies (strangelove, caddyshack), directors, completely random words (Rate, Arm, Nostalgia)... We settled on martial arts styles. Shaolin, aikido, kendo, judo. Also good for in-house sloganeering. "Shaolin: We beat the fuck out of the competition!" etc.

Surf spots (I guess this is a California thing):

Mavericks
Trestles
Mundaka
Waimea
Teahupoo

We use a code - e.g. A123-01-01 . It's supposed to denote "Customer - Project - Deliverable", but invariably nobody has any idea what the code refers to, and we end up calling it "Customer's - whatever it is supposed to do".

And all of our customers start with the letter A. I don't know why. There's less than 40 people in the company - I can't imagine we'll ever have 26000 customers.

We've previously used both IKEA products and made up words - used to send an email round asking for a made up word beginning with "P" and get responses. Most fun was choosing real product names - usually turned into a battle of attrition between programmers and marketing!

I guess I've mostly worked for some boring places, but the one big project that my first employer developed was code-named Hydra. It had many heads and when you cut one off 2 more would grow back.

When I was at a rather large Telco in the late 90's we used natural disasters... Typhoon, Tsunami, Tornado, Earthquake...

Since our actual product names are: 'The UI', 'The Dashboard', 'The Reporting System', and 'Leagcy Reports'... I think it would be a nice change to actually name our projects (even if they are only internal names). A former programmer of mine named our WebFOCUS project WebHUMPUS...

I dont like it when real product names are acronyms - everything ends up being called DSMS or DMS or VMS or something MS (something something Management System)

Acronyms are so 20th century!

Well, there's always Ubuntu release naming scheme:

* Breezy Badger
* Dapper Drake
* Edgy Eft
* Feisty Fawn
* Gutsy Gibbon
* Hardy Heron

They tend to go by the adjective for a short one-word name.

"Google Sets is a relevant tool for this type of activity"

I entered the project names listed and came up with nothing (as well as a regular search). I'm clueless - what's the set?

While I think you need to have internal reference names for projects, particularly since marketing depts like to change the names of things from time to time, I find it frankly annoying when projects are given cute names that have no semantic meaning.

Consider someone coming new at an application, and going to source control, and seeing names of famous artists instead of something more prosaic. Trying to find the project that some bit of code comes from can be confusing and frustrating.

"So Marketing calls this 'FizzBuzz', but internally it's 'CoderTest' and it's in source control as.. ?"

"It's mostly in the 'Slimer' project, but there's a bit from 'Venkman' too."

One should keep long term maintenance in mind, and have some sort of codename-to-functional description tracking; especially if you have projects that are expected to live on well past the average employment time of the developer(s) who originally wrote the project.

"I find it frankly annoying when projects are given cute names that have no semantic meaning"

Heh. I worked on the "Gee Whiz" project once. Only when the project finally died did I realize that it actually meant something, being that the device was, originally, going to interface with the 'G' bus on a larger system and was somehow related to the acronym 'WIS'.

You can use... pokemon names! Or, 80's/90's japanese arcade games.

I had shared an idea with a friend for naming servers a while back. He then got a job where he got to overhaul an entire network, so all his servers are named after Transformers.

Acronyms are horrible and functional names don't usually "stick". I try to find a one word name that plays off the functionality somewhat. A double-treeview allocation tool was called Dryad.

I use real project names. Just because I know what the project is for when we start. This way I don't have to rename the names in any docs after deployment or have to remember what name was what project.
As for different versions, I suffix with version #. It works and it's as close to real life.

"I'd love to hear how people are handling this in the industry. If the project name is Gobstopper does this name appear anywhere in the code/installation/architecture?"

We have a project codename and a standard three-letter abbreviation of it that gets used throughout the codebase, documentation, etc. This means the software is decoupled from the content -- design and marketing can change the name of the project multiple times before ship, and we don't have to go through the codebase and rename anything. By keeping a formal codename, though, everyone knows what you're talking about when you mention Gobstopper, and where the GobBufferManager class came from.

Or just take a look at a captcha and you get your project's name (See the name of this post)

Question: do you include your project name in your namespace hierarchy? YourCompany.Arsenic.Data or YourCompany.Lithium.Web.WebControls? Does that namespace get changed before the product is released?

Volcanoes (StHelens, Krakatoa)
Famous Hurricanes (Alicia, Katrina)
Arcane Biblical Names (Orpah, Zilla)
Trees (maple, oaktree)
Liquor (cachaca, absinthe)
Cities (Milan, Boise)
Historic slang (bounce, cat, fly)

"Famous People (eg, Sagan)"

Don't do it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_litigation_of_Apple_Computer#Libel_dispute_with_Carl_Sagan

What is the goal of having a project pet name? I mean why not just call it by the PRODUCT NAME??

I have a feeling the product name is too boring for us programmers so we have to give it a pet name so it doesn't remind us of what we are really making! haha Or maybe it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside knowing that we are making something that has a code name too it.

We recently named one 'Project Airwolf' .. and in thinking, there are loads of 80s and 90s TV shows which would work!

- Deathly Diseases (appropriate for most software projects)
- Body parts
- Garden tools

Lord of the Rings characters seem to be a popular choice for server names (at the last few places I have worked, anyway)

As far as product/project names, from my experience (and depending on your industry), the product name is likely to change due to marketing terminology changes, as the company adapts to its market (especially if it is a long term project). So you might as well have some fun with it internally.

At my workplace, I tend to give servers very simple names based on function (prebook, webserver, proxy, and fileserver), but this is mainly possible because we only _need_ one webserver, etc.

As for project names, I tend to make short, cool names related to the purpose of the project (Blackstream for a dataflow project, for example). Mildly obscure movie references are good, too, though (Keymaster and Gatekeeper were competing for the name of one of our projects).

I always enjoyed this story about the [code]naming of Netscape's "ElectricalFire" JVM project:

<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060924060259/http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ef/faq.html#Naming">http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ef/faq.html</a>;

<blockquote><b>How did the project get its name?</b>

Scott Silver, one of the first EF developers, originally wanted to codename the project "Sexual Chocolate". (I'm not making this up.) That name was rejected, presumably because it would confuse Netscape's managers: "So, this Sexual Chocolate project actually has nothing to do with chocolate ?" Instead, Silver proposed "Electrical Fire" (two separate words). For the open-source release, Scott Furman coalesced the two words into one: "ElectricalFire", to make it apparent that the project was not to be confused with a safety hazard. A word of advice for the wise: if you end up working on a project with Scott Silver, do not allow him to handle the project codename.</blockquote>

oops. that Mozilla URL is 404. Here is the archived version:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060924060259/http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ef/faq.html#Naming

Hrm... We don't name our projects anything creative. Just "User Management Project" or "Data Charts Project" (and yes, for some reason we tag "project" to the end of the name).

However, at home, I name all of my computers after DragonBall Z characters, ranked by how good the computer is (what it's 'power level' is).

So Krillin/Picollo/Yamcha for my little linux boxes, Vegeta/Goku for my windows machines, and then DBZ bad guys for my wife's computers since I can't use them (which means they are enemy computers) Raditz/Nappa. :)

At my company we used an different set per client, we used Radio Alphabet, Sylvester Stallone characters (Rocky, Rambo, ...) and Harrison Ford characters last name (Solo, Jones, Ryan , etc...) . Of course the project are named in the order of the movies release.

Descriptive names.

Otherwise you end up with a million names that sounded cool when you came up with them, but now form some sort of arcane nerd language that only two people speak, of which one has left the company.

Version 2.0 of our project will completely overhaul the system from the database up. I must've come up with a list of twenty internal code names for this rewrite before we stumbled on the perfect one in the first planning meeting... "Jedi".

I was thinking that the "Ski Resorts" list would be a cool list. But I don't think I'd be able to recruit anyone to work on my "Purgatory" project. :)

This discussion reminds me of some points I described in my book "Practical Development Environments". They're on my blog in more detail
(http://toolsmiths.blogspot.com/2007/11/choosing-project-names.html) but basically:

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.

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.

These names would never fly in the government sector, where all naming creativity has to go into formulating a clever acronym out of what the application does.

Example: BGAS (Block Grant Application System). And yes, it's a big ass monolithic application. Believe it or not, civil servants LOVE this. :)

Back to the commercial world though: here's one that never fails: Ski resorts! :)

Don't forget about: Rivers

I worked at a startup company in Anacortes, Washington, and since it was located on Fidalgo Island, one of the San Juan Islands, we decided to use that island group as our set of internal project names. The first project was called Orcas and the second Lopez. The marketing folks liked the names so well they decided to use them for actual public product names. They changed Lopez to Cypress, however, as it was a bit catchier.

Alas, the company was sold, but the two initial product names live on: http://www.accu-med.com/main/Products.asp.

Native American tribes; Kilchis, Tillamook, Yakima, Umatilla, Cayuse, Siuslaw, Makah, Quinault, Coquile, Ochoco

National Forests, Battlefields and Rivers

At the same company, we initially named our servers after Disney characters: Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Donald, etc. As soon as we hired a real network administrator, he chose to abandon these cool names in favor of boring names like mailserver1, fileserver1, etc.

Slang for sexually transmitted diseases:

"Almost finished with Project Crabs"
"I'm working on the Clap"

Victoria Secret Models

"Adriana, Gisele, Miranda, Alessandra, Heidi, etc.."

The elements from the periodic table: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, etc (http://www.webelements.com/). You even have abbreviations already: h, he, li, be.

Not computer related, but I used to work for a games company where there was one particular designer was upset that his internal code-name for a previous project ended up as the public name. He had always hated the name, wasn't responsible for its initial creation, and only used it under duress and the promise that it wouldn't make the final public release.

To avoid it happening again, he made sure his next project was code-named "Pig Wank", and that's how he always referred to it in printed material, meetings, etc.

Aw, c'mon, nobody's going to take a stab at identifying the project names I mentioned at the front of the post?

Michelangelo: Comic book character. Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(TMNT)

Nash: Brand of car. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_Motors

Whiskeytown: National park. http://www.nps.gov/whis/

Gobstopper: Candy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobstopper

We used also name of places of the childhood of the developers in the team.
I also wrote a similar post back in February:
http://codeclimber.net.nz/archive/2007/02/07/Codename-your-releases.aspx

In my company, our server's names come from Kill Bill characters. At first we used only women names, but after Yubari and Elle we ran out of names and had to move on to male characters. Curiously, we don't have a Bill server yet :)

At work we're using characters from great literary fiction for our iterations, e.g., Athos, Beowulf, etc.

I've always been a fan of naming my machines after bad action film and TV stars. Some of my favorites include CHUCKNORRIS, CHRISLAMBERT, STEVENSEAGAL, LUCYLAWLESS. You get the drift.

I know the post is about names, but I'll tell you about fonts: In a 15 inch LCD monitor this new font is really bad to read. Is there any way to switch to the old font style ?

Project Naming Committees are where we send Management when we need to get them out of our hair for a while.

@Jeff
I was going to try the 2 first, but after your answers, I totally failed.

I'll post the sets I thought:

Michelangelo : Renaissance artists (fail)
Nash : Mathematicians (fail)

Some others that could be nice:

Food: pepperoni, beef, cabbage, lettuce, carrot, cinnamon, basil,... (avoid tomato(e) and potato(e) if your team has mixed Brits and USians)

Ilands: Madagascar, Hawaii, Cuba, Easter, Japan,...

Politicians: Carter, Kennedy, Reagan, Blair, Tatcher, Miterrand, Lennin,...

OMG, English phonetics is killing me, I meant Islands :)

I use president names or myname+(some number)

I'm not very creative heh.

You know, when I used to work for a big company, it was pretty important to decide what to code name a project, because the project visibility and image within the company were considered very important. Now that I work in a company with around 25 people (and less than half that when I started), we just give things descriptive names. Honestly, it works just fine, and it seems a lot less silly than telling people you're working on a project called Lemonheads, or MooseDrool, or Lothlorien or something.

Star Trek characters, of course!

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Portal:People

We use pornstar names.

We don't do client work though.

I typically use professional wrestling names for my projects...have for years. Usually just the last name or their character name. And with new characters coming & going all the time, the list is plentiful:
- Savage
- Steamboat
- Orndorf
- Valentine
- Flair
- Jericho

And at one point in time the team I was on used television program names and associated names -- mostly because it was at a CBS affiliate station:
- Dallas
- South Fork
- Scarecrow
- Hazzard
- Dynasty
- Hourglass

I've used mythical names a lot too. But now that I'm more of a one-man team I tend to stick with wrestling names. Keeps it fun and is great for conversation too.

My day job is with the DoD, so we of course name everything with huge, obscure acronyms that we then pronounce phonetically. (Defense Finance and Accounting Service = DFAS = Deefas)

When I'm naming a personal project, I try to come up with an original word that I just think sounds cool. Right now I'm working on one I call Operoth.

We use acronyms, but ours tend to be pretty involved. They've included Spartacus and (our current project) Vlad the Impaler.

I've got nothing against naming a project for what it does, but sometimes you know a project name won't be unique. We can't call something "Accounting Rewrite" when we know that there will be another one in a few years -- I guess we could do "Accounting Rewrite 2006" but Spartacus is much easier to say and remember (and keep the documentation organized).

Why not use the operations code name lists from World War II - they were specifically selected to:
- no give away locations, functions etc,
- while providing senses of grandeur, importance, and so on.

A number of them are freely available online - the US Army's official one is at:
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/reference/code.htm

I always try to find something at least tangentially related to what the project is supposed to do, and then work out a way to creatively misspell it to avoid potential trademark problems. ;)

If that doesn't turn anything up, I'll try and construct a silly recursive acronym that has more than one meaning. Bonus points for getting something with both a rude expansion, and a completely benign one. Failing that, I either pick something that has a cool logo associated with it, or that's just so plain bizzare and silly, that no one will ever forget it.

I really do have too much fun coming up with names for things.

I started naming my projects after famous cities, and then giving individual sections of the project names of famous monuments from that city. eg: A CMS called Paris where the secured admin-only area was called La Bastille. (Though, naming it after a jail which was broken *into*, probably wasn't the most thought-through idea.)

Weused New Jersey Turnpike rest areas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Turnpike#Rest_areas. Took people a while to catch on.

Muppet characters for us, or more specifically Sesame Street characters.

The muppet wiki is your friend for this one

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Interesting, I always figured they picked the "codenames" after the fact by martketing. I've always used a short descriptive word or phrase that the project accomplishes.

Servers though ;-) My favorite scheme was construction equipment, like Jackhammer, Excavator, DumpTruck, etc.

Star wars planet names also worked. I miss Beru :-(

Cheers, ya'll!

We name domain controllers after dead rock stars. hehe

Our first theme, roller coasters was the best. Our current set is Candy Bars, which sounds good at first, but doesn't really work. You need a set with a good distribution and something to cover Q and Z, typically hard ones.

I thought National Parks would be good but we had lots of complaints. Michaelangelo was a very successful and long project, but to this day, I still can't spell his name. Oh, and that's the turtle guy, not the painter.

Scott Stanfield, CEO
Vertigo

Forgot to add a couple of rules to picking the sets for project names at our company:

1. There needs to be a published (online) list of at least 26 items, A-Z.
2. They need to be "client-friendly". So the porn stars are out.
3. I get the final approval.

We decided to label our final release destination "Chicago", and each intermediate release would be a city on the way to Chicago from our offices here in Minnesota. Works out pretty well. :-)

Since the president/owner of the company likes to fish in his kayak in the Gulf of Mexico (we're based in SW Florida), our releases are named for fish. Sand Flea is about to be released; Threadfin is ready for release testing. We usually find an image of the fish to stick in our Groove homepage for the release version (each release has its own Groove space).

I'm all about ridiculous non-descriptive names, and anything with an umlaut gets special attention. I have had projects called ÜberThingie, Figure Outer, Reconfabulationator, and Björne (which is also an acronym with the E standing for XML).

I can also name projects as a commentary on how smoothly they are running. Project Icebox and Project Clayton were destined to be ones that required constant attention and headed for a spectacular train wreck, respectively.

I'm part of the sustained engineering group in our company, meaning that I deal with released software. The feature development team loves these goofy names, but they never have to live with the consequences. Of the wombat, platypus, giraffe, shrew, bat, cat, and elephant projects, which ones belong to which products? What order are they in? Did Dingbat come before Goofball? Does Sneezy belong with Dopey or Doc?

Our documentation intermingles project and product version numbers all the time, and for newcomers to my department it's a nightmare. It's particularly frustrating because it's so unnecessary. Sure, you don't want to use product names because those change, no problem. I advocate using the _original_ base name for the product and an integer . That way you always know which projects belong to what, and what order they happened in. It's not fun, but it isn't making needless trouble for others either.

Developers aren't children, you don't have to call something the 'lolipop' project to get us to work on it. We are being paid, after all.

I'd been pushing for Godzilla monster names:

http://www.lavasurfer.com/godzilla/topher-zilla-names.html

but no one could agree on how to pronounce them. I'm using those for my computers now (typing this from my notebook, Mothra). My current agenda at work is to talk them into doing Marvel super-villains. My biggest problem is that the wikipedia list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Marvel_Comics_supervillains

is just too long. Plus you just know that someone is going to choose Batroc the Leaper.

We still do it the boring "what it does" way too, but if it were up to me it would be after Transformers characters.

On the Subtext project, we use nautical terms. we started off with Submarine names, but we don't know the names of very many submarines.

Lorem Ipsum words, obviously. ;)

How are GUIDs or unicode characters good project name ? Nobody will be able to memorize GUIDs, and even if they did, nobody would easily recognize a name as they start their 5-minute-monologue just to pronounce the name, and nobody could pronounce all the unicode characters (nor TYPE) at all. Horrible, horrible ideas.

My servers are all named after cars. Delorean, Lotus, AlfaRomeo, etc.

A company I interviewed at had 3 of their servers named Marshall, Will, and Holly. That was awesome.

For our Servers we once used Snowflake's 7 dwarfs names.

Right now, for our project, I think we'll be using Chocolate blends or natural disasters... :P

Italian cellphone operator Omnitel (then Vodafone) sometimes used game names: Risiko (i.e. Risk), Monopoli (i.e. Monopoly), Pokemon...

IMDb 250 -> choose your favourite word (or two) from each title listed; starting at 1 then going down.

Project Godfather? Project Cuckoo? Project Strangelove?--try explaining that to the clients!

Aw, c'mon, nobody's going to take a stab at identifying the project names I mentioned at the front of the post?

The way you phrased it I assumed that they were all from a single set.

Machine names derived from local bars and pubs. it's handy in a college town because all the new hires will know the names and there are plenty of names to choose from. ;)

@Haacked Wikipedia (of course) knows all the U.S. submarines ever build: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_submarines_of_the_United_States_Navy

previos firm used names of islands.and the 80's band names(Camper Van B). US submarines are named after: Sturgeon class= fish Los Angeles class=cities OHIO class...

As a humorous aside, one place where this was prominently done was in the case of nuclear testing. The first nuclear test was given a secretive code name (Trinity) by the enigmatic Oppenheimer; the next test series (run by the less enigmatic military) simply used military A-B-C codenames (Able, Baker, and Charlie, though the latter was not fired). After going through a number of these more "boring" military sets, and as testing became more plentiful they started giving them more creative names. The names weren't supposed to have any correlation to the weapons being tested, but in some cases they were mnemonics—King was K for Kiloton, Mike was M for Megaton, both of which being special "superbombs" of Operation Castle; some were named after the code-names of their component parts, e.g. shot Harry tested the "Hamlet" device, shot Climax tested the "Cobra" device, etc. Anyway, later test series took their inspiration Native American tribes (either ironic or in bad taste, given the history of Native American interactions with government uranium mining, testing, development, etc.), scientists, wildflowers, insects, mountains, rivers, gods, etc.

We just use the names of local pubs, so we have systems called 'Jackson' and 'George' (Sydneysiders will note our downmarket tastes!).

CynicalTyler - you are my hero.

How about referring your projects with names of Flower-- like

1) Project Rose
2) Project Orchid
3) Project Tulip and bla...bla

people who love god names would probably refer to http://pantheon.org/

Over the years I've been part of teams that have used project name themes such as:

- Famous Bobs
- Chainsaw manufacturers ('chopping' down the competition)
- Beer

The latter is a favorite, because there's opportunity for the management team to show their support by creating a 'beer wall' of the appropriately named project. :)

I love how these types of posts seem to end up, one group going "Ho Hum, you are all stupid" and the other group enthusiastically involved, shooting up new ideas and having a great time of it all. See the security post in this same blag for an even more extreme variation.

Sports teams

At the risk of coming across as one of the "Ho Hum, you are all stupid" group that Craig coined, I find it amazing how much passion people put into project names - really, what value do they add? At my former employer, we had project names assigned for a suite release - all of a sudden there were meetings after meetings where expensive management (i.e.: measured as high in salary with no statement as to the wealth of any of their other attributes) were sitting around arguing about what names the projects should have. This endeavour, and the offshoot documents, emails, further meetings, re-naming of projects, bumping of renamings up to the executive for approval, etc., probably cost the company tens of thousands of dollars. How did that serve the stockholders of the company? The reality of the matter wasn't that anything was wrong with the initial names but rather the QA guy, a racing car fan, wanted all the projects he worked on named after F1 racing teams, one of the development managers desperately trying to prove he had some intelligence somewhere wanted all his projects named after some physics phenomena, etc. These were pure ego-driven endeavours that brought no value to the company and served only to appease a few small minded individuals (one of whom quit to go work for another company about 2 months after getting his way).

What's in a file name:

check this out: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Sr51Gxd59kA
and enjoy!
Joe.

Spices could work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spices

For one of our custom apps we use breakfast cereal names. They meet the "client friendly" and can also imply something about the contents of the release. For example a completely revamped version for a new client was called "Lucky Charms" and an upcoming version that has not a lot of end user stuff, just lots of architectural changes is called "Bran Buds" - you know, doesn't taste great, but good for you ;-)

"Famous" golf courses. For the non-golfers in our group, which is the vase majority of us, golf course names have the benefit of being entirely context-free. What preconceived associations do I have with Doral or Troon? None.

There are plenty of "List of Xs" here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Lists_of_topics

For a little while, I used two sets for projects: animals and food.

For example:
Cat Crêpe
Whale Melon
Hawk Fajita

Sounds funny, doesn't it?

I started out with machines named after dinosaur sites and discoverers: ComoBluff, Wyoming, DrinkerCope, SheepCreek, etc.

DrinkerCope was somewhat misinterpreted by my colleagues at the time...

Now I am posting from Tsunami, with a collection of virtual machines called Sasami, Tokemi, and Washu (plus the standard Microsoft release names for all my reference test OS virtual machines, such as Whistler, etc). As for my current projects: I'll save that for when my main website goes up(;P).

Well, of course all my personal stuff is just Stu+something (Stutwo, Stumu, Studos, Stumpy, Stumby, Stumbo, Stucks).

One really nice set for boxes since logos et al have already been made for you is the original attractions of Epcot Center (Horizons, Communicore, World of Motion).

For codenames, look no farther than the back of Duran Duran's Greatest (Electric Barbarella, Wild Boys, Girls on Film).

When I make something quick, dumb and empty (temporary folder to test path recognition, etc) it usually comes out as "LOL", followed by "omg", "wtf".

Most of my work involves a client that already has a name so I just use that throughout the code. I do have my own little library of helpful things that I always re-use that I call 'Magnum'. In addition to that, my personal computer is called 'Gemini' and my two external harddrives are called 'Castor' and 'Pollux'. My workgroup is 'MILKY WAY'.

I have an old Advanced Dungeous & Dragons encyclopedia of Dieties & Demigods in my basement at home that I use for picking out codenames. I usually open a page at random and just grab the first one I see. No one on my team knows this is where the 'freaky' codenames come from!

Some recent ones:

Geb
Draupnir
Freke
Roofdrak
Torc
Hunapu
Mjolnir
Apep
Ebisu
Loviatar
Modi
Stoneribs

Last one was a favorite and remains our dedicated in-house, web-based issue reporting backend!

Grape varieties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grape_varieties