What is a good variable name?

You've probably heard a thousand times that a good variable name describes what it is. Some people also thinks that the shorter the scope of the variable, the shorter should the name be. That was maybe true if you write the name out by hand but I think the best (and only) rule of thumb is that the name should be easy to read and describe what it represents. But sometimes it is hard coming up with a good name so what do you do? In the past a did my best to come up with something good but if it is hard to come up with the name, whatever name you come up with will not be that good. But from now on I'll do another thing I read about here. It is embarrassing how obvious the solution is. In TDD you make minimal changes until you have enough code to see the obvious refactorings needed. And the same thing applies to variable names. If it's not obvious at the moment what a variable should be called, just call it something and move on. A few TDD cycles later you'll probably know what a good name for that variable is and you refactor it then. So don't waste time trying to come up with good variable names. Move on and refactor later when it is obvious!

The good thing about this strategy is that it applies not only to variable names. It works great on all types of names in your code; methods, classes, constants and so on. And yes, I'm assuming you have a refactoring tool that let's you change these names securely and you don't have to do a search and replace that might be a little more dangerous if all your I-don't-know-the-name-yet variables are called "x"...