  Practitioners often argue that range names make spreadsheets easier to
understand and use, akin to the role of good variable names in traditional
programming languages, yet there is no supporting scientific evidence. The
authors previously published experiments that disproved this theory in relation
to debugging, and now turn their focus to development. This paper presents the
results of two iterations of a new experiment, which measure the effect of
range names on the correctness of, and the time it takes to develop, simple
summation formulas. Our findings, supported by statistically significant
results, show that formulas developed by non-experts using range names are more
likely to contain errors and take longer to develop. Taking these findings with
the findings from previous experiments, we conclude that range names do not
improve the quality of spreadsheets developed by novice and intermediate users.
This paper is important in that it finds that the choice of naming convention
can have a significant impact on novice and intermediate users' performance in
formula development, with less structured naming conventions resulting in
poorer performance by users.
