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The GDS Way and its content is intended for internal use by the GDS community.

How to name software products

Read this guide when you need to name components for your software product, for example applications, software libraries, plugins or frameworks. Your users should understand what something does from its name.

Your product name should be self-descriptive

Avoid using puns or branding for names as this makes it difficult for others to understand what it does.

Make sure you use the same name consistently whenever you’re referring to the same product. For example the name of this website’s GitHub repository is alphagov/gds-way.

These GDS product names clearly communicate their purpose:

These GDS product names are ambiguous and possibly confusing:

Further reading

The Service Manual has guidance on naming services, and this will be relevant when naming applications or packages.

This page was last reviewed on 7 November 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 7 May 2025 by the page owner #gds-way .
This page was set to be reviewed before 7 May 2025 by the page owner #gds-way. This might mean the content is out of date.