A study of the documentation essential to software maintenance

Souza, Sergio Cozzetti B. de; Anquetil, Nicolas; Oliveira, Káthia Marçal de

doi:10.1145/1085313.1085331

Cited by 213 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…To know which types of changes in code are likely to affect the external behaviour of the system, we conducted a small exploratory study using a real software project, namely an open source project for a barcode reader called ZXing 1 . The research question of this study is RQ1: What heuristics can be used to identify source code changes that likely affect the external behaviour of the system?…”

Section: Exploratory Study: Identifying Relations Between Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Requirements specifications are used by engineers for several maintenance-related tasks [1], such as comprehending programs, getting the rationale behind the implementation, identifying critical parts in the system, and discussing changes with stakeholders. Therefore, losing the knowledge contained in the requirements specification hinders the maintainability of software systems and limits their capacity for evolution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifying outdated requirements based on source code changes

Charrada

Koziolek

Glinz

2012

2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)

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Keeping requirements specifications up-to-date when systems evolve is a manual and expensive task. Software engineers have to go through the whole requirements document and look for the requirements that are affected by a change. Consequently, engineers usually apply changes to the implementation directly and leave requirements unchanged. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatically detecting outdated requirements based on changes in the code. Our approach first identifies the changes in the code that are likely to affect requirements. Then it extracts a set of keywords describing the changes. These keywords are traced to the requirements specification, using an existing automated traceability tool, to identify affected requirements. Automatically identifying outdated requirements reduces the effort and time needed for the maintenance of requirements specifications significantly and thus helps preserve the knowledge contained in them. We evaluated our approach in a case study where we analyzed two consecutive source code versions and were able to detect 12 requirements-related changes out of 14 with a precision of 79%. Then we traced a set of keywords we extracted from these changes to the requirements specification. In comparison to simply tracing changed classes to requirements, we got better results in most cases. Identifying Outdated Requirements Based on Source Code ChangesEya Ben Charrada, Anne Koziolek, Martin Glinz Departement of Informatics, University of Zurich, Switzerland {charrada, koziolek, glinz}@ifi.uzh.chAbstract-Keeping requirements specifications up-to-date when systems evolve is a manual and expensive task. Software engineers have to go through the whole requirements document and look for the requirements that are affected by a change. Consequently, engineers usually apply changes to the implementation directly and leave requirements unchanged.In this paper, we propose an approach for automatically detecting outdated requirements based on changes in the code. Our approach first identifies the changes in the code that are likely to affect requirements. Then it extracts a set of keywords describing the changes. These keywords are traced to the requirements specification, using an existing automated traceability tool, to identify affected requirements.Automatically identifying outdated requirements reduces the effort and time needed for the maintenance of requirements specifications significantly and thus helps preserve the knowledge contained in them.We evaluated our approach in a case study where we analyzed two consecutive source code versions and were able to detect 12 requirements-related changes out of 14 with a precision of 79%. Then we traced a set of keywords we extracted from these changes to the requirements specification. In comparison to simply tracing changed classes to requirements, we got better results in most cases.

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Section: Exploratory Study: Identifying Relations Between Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying outdated requirements based on source code changes

Charrada

Koziolek

Glinz

2012

2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)

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“…Previous work had shown that code comments can help improve software maintainability [1]. However, many code bases do not contain adequate code comments [2]. Therefore, it is beneficial to generate code comments automatically since it can save developers' time in writing comments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

CloCom: Mining existing source code for automatic comment generation

Wong

Liu

Tan

2015

2015 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER)

122

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Abstract-Code comments are an integral part of software development. They improve program comprehension and software maintainability. The lack of code comments is a common problem in the software industry. Therefore, it is beneficial to generate code comments automatically. In this paper, we propose a general approach to generate code comments automatically by analyzing existing software repositories. We apply code clone detection techniques to discover similar code segments and use the comments from some code segments to describe the other similar code segments. We leverage natural language processing techniques to select relevant comment sentences.In our evaluation, we analyze 42 million lines of code from 1,005 open source projects from GitHub, and use them to generate 359 code comments for 21 Java projects. We manually evaluate the generated code comments and find that only 23.7% of the generated code comments are good. We report to the developers the good code comments, whose code segments do not have an existing code comment. Amongst the reported code comments, seven have been confirmed by the developers as good and committable to the software repository while the rest await for developers' confirmation. Although our approach can generate good and committable comments, we still have to improve the yield and accuracy of the proposed approach before it can be used in practice with full automation.

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“…Software documentation, specifically in the form of code commenting, is essential to program understanding [21,62,65,72]. Consistent documentation changes should coincide with code changes (such as patches to fix bugs) to ensure the continued quality and understandability of a code base.…”

Section: Ensuring Documentation Completeness and Consistencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ensuring that documentation completely and consistently describes its associated code amidst a high volume of code changes is paramount to ensuring the long-term quality of a system [21,32,41,55,62]. We propose to develop a concept-based method for identifying incomplete and inconsistent comments, leveraging both automatic documentation techniques and lightweight similarity metrics.…”

Section: Research: Ensuring Documentation Consistencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging Light-Weight Analyses to Aid Software Maintenance

Fry

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Software maintenance can account for up to 90% of a system's life cycle cost. As a result, many automated techniques have been developed to reduce the overall effort necessary to sustain software over time. While many of these tools work well under certain circumstances, we believe that they could be improved by taking advantage of large untapped sources of unstructured information that result from natural software development. As the size and complexity of systems increases, taking advantage of such previously-overlooked information is of paramount importance.The proposed research will design lightweight analyses to extract latent information encoded by humans in software development artifacts and thereby reduce the costs of software maintenance. We will design analyses that apply throughout the maintenance process, focusing on three areas: (1) triaging large collections of exposed defects; (2) guiding the search for automatic defect repairs; and (3) ensuring the continued consistency of system documentation over time.For each area of proposed research we aim to improve upon existing approaches to reduce the total cost of software maintenance while requiring minimal additional developer effort. We will evaluate the proposed work using these criteria on a diverse set of real world programs totaling millions of lines of code to concretely show the reduction of maintenance cost and improvement upon existing processes.

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A study of the documentation essential to software maintenance

Cited by 213 publications

References 22 publications

Identifying outdated requirements based on source code changes

Identifying outdated requirements based on source code changes

CloCom: Mining existing source code for automatic comment generation

Leveraging Light-Weight Analyses to Aid Software Maintenance

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