A while back I exchanged a few ideas with Dennis Gurock about names for their new testing product. Choosing a name is difficult, but it is something every product developer has to do. So I asked Dennis to write a guest post about the process they went through before they ended up with ‘TestRail’.

Coming up with a great name for your new business, product or service is hard. I’m sure you already noticed that! But what is a good name anyway? Deciding if you like a name is, of course, pretty subjective. But there are some useful criteria that can help you find a great name.

Around a year ago we desperately needed a name for the new test management software we had been working on. We aren’t very good with names. In fact, we used a codename for the project until the very last minute, so that we didn’t have to come up with the product name earlier. Still, even with many months to think about a name, it was difficult to find one that we liked.

So what did we do to finally decide a name? We made a list, of course (we are programmers for a reason). A list of objective criteria that the new name should meet. This helped us quickly evaluate new names that we brainstormed. So I figured, if it helped us coming up with a name, why not share our tips with other fellow programmers? So here are the criteria that we used to find a name for our new product.

#1 The shorter, the better

A good, catchy name needs to be short. Do you think Google would be used as a verb today if it had six syllables? I don’t think so either. But even if you don’t plan to become the next Google, having a short name that can be used in everyday discussions is a powerful way to make your brand stick. “Have you seen the bug report in Jira?”, “Could you post your meeting notes to Basecamp?”, “What’s the project status in TestRail?”

#2 Make it easy to spell

Coming up with “creative” and “hip” ways to spell your new name is generally not a very good idea. I’m pretty sure Joel Spolsky has regretted more than once naming his bug tracker FogBugz. I once talked to a customer who kept calling it fog bug zed and I’m sure he is not alone. You don’t want a customer’s purchasing department not find your product on the web because they are unable to spell it correctly.

#3 Own the .com domain

Did you notice that a lot of companies don’t own the .com domain of their new brand names lately? There’s a good reason for it: most good .com domains are taken. If you have been trying to register a good domain name recently you know how frustrating that can be. Still, I don’t believe it’s a good idea to just own widgethq.com, or foobarapp.com. Invest the time and resources to come up with a name that you can  register or buy the .com domain for. You don’t want a competitor to purchase “your” .com domain from a domain squatter after you invested tens of thousands of dollars to promote your brand name.

#4 Trademarks, or: how not to get sued

This one is important. You really want to make sure that you are not infringing on someone else’s trademark. So make sure your new name is not already used or registered (at least in your industry) and that it’s not similar to an existing mark. Ideally you come up with a name that you can easily register with your country’s trademark office (and then do so when you actually use it). I’m not going to pretend that I know everything about trademarks and I’m not a lawyer. So make sure to either contact a lawyer or do your own research on this topic. I found Trademark: Legal Care for Your Business & Product Name from Nolo pretty helpful.

#5 Google is your friend

I’m sure Microsoft didn’t foresee how a simple name could impact developers’ life so negatively when they decided to name their new software platform .NET over ten years ago. It turned out that such a generic name (especially with a leading dot) made it really difficult for developers to find related resources online using a search engine. Don’t make the same mistake. Choose a name that is unique and can be easily found on Google. It can also help your search rankings if your product name contains relevant search terms. For example, our new product is related to software testing and having the term ‘test’ in the product name helped us considerably with this.

#6 Consult a native speaker

Are you not a native speaker of the language your primary market communicates in (e.g. English)? Have you found a great name that is unique, that no one uses, has no trademark registration and is available as a .com domain? Congratulations, you’ve probably found a name that is severely offensive to native speakers in one way or another! If it weren’t so embarrassing, this would now be the place where I told you a story about how I once almost named a product similar to a body part you don’t usually want to talk about in a business conversation. The moral of the story is that you should always discuss your name ideas with a native speaker before making a complete fool of yourself.

It can be a challenge to find a name that meets all these criteria perfectly. Some of the criteria are obviously more important than others, but I still recommend trying to come up with a name that meets most of them.

So how did we end up naming our new product? We called it TestRail. It’s not the best name in the world, but we are happy that we came up with a name we like. And most importantly, having finally found a name allowed us to concentrate on doing what we enjoy most: building great tools for software teams.

Dennis Gurock is the director and co-founder of Gurock Software, a company specialized in tools for software development teams and quality assurance departments. Gurock’s first product SmartInspect is a .NET, Java and Delphi logging tool. Gurock’s second product TestRail is comprehensive web-based test case management software to efficiently manage, track and organize software testing efforts. Dennis can also be found on Twitter as @dgurock.

It can also help your search rankings if your product name contains
relevant search terms. For example, our new product is related to
software testing and having the term 'test' in the product name helped
us considerably with this.