Automatically identifying reusable OO legacy code

Etzkorn, Letha H.; Davis, Carl G.

doi:10.1109/2.625311

Cited by 72 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…For object-oriented code, more so than for functionally-oriented code, much understanding can be performed by simply looking at comment and identifier names (Etzkorn, Davis, Bowen, Etzkorn, Lewis, Vinz, Wolf 1996;Etzkorn and Davis 1997). This is true since object-oriented code is organized in classes, with everything required to implement a class at least mentioned (if not defined) in the class definition.…”

Section: Object-oriented Program Understanding Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Figure 5 shows the results of an analysis of tense in sentence style comments, from the first study of three graphical user interface packages (Etzkorn and Davis 1997). Note that 57% of all comments are in sentence style.…”

Section: Object-oriented Program Understanding Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The C++ parser employed is the Brown University C++ parser, which generates a parsable abstract syntax tree output in a file. The natural language parser is the Sleator and Temperley natural language parser (Sleator and Temperley 1991 to the fact that comments tend to possess restricted grammar and dictionary (part of the sublanguage aspect of comments) Etzkorn and Davis 1997).…”

Section: Patricia System-description Of Operationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An approach to program understanding by natural language understanding

1999

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Section: Object-oriented Program Understanding Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Object-oriented Program Understanding Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Patricia System-description Of Operationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An approach to program understanding by natural language understanding

1999

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“…It has actually been observed that code identifiers and comments are usually expressed in a simplified form of the natural language, with a smaller vocabulary set and simplified grammar [31]. Etzkorn and Davis [24] studied several software packages and found that around 83% of the comments written in sentence form are in the present tense, and around 78% of identifiers names are noun-related. These observations raise questions concerning the effect of using stemming when indexing source code for traceability recovery.…”

Section: Stemmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also, Takang et al reported that commented programs are more understandable than non-commented programs [23]. In [24], Etzkorn and Davis introduced Patricia, a system that uses heuristic methods to identify reusable software components through understanding comments and identifiers. Similarly, CodeBroker utilizes knowledge from comments and code identifiers to find software components that can be reused [25].…”

Section: Information Extractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Source code indexing for automated tracing

Mahmoud

Niu

2011

Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering

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Requirements-to-source-code traceability employs information retrieval (IR) methods to automatically link requirements to the source code that implements them. A crucial step in this process is indexing, where partial and important information from the software artifacts is converted into a representation that is compatible with the underlying IR model. Source code demands special attention in the indexing process. In this paper, we investigate source code indexing for supporting automatic traceability. We introduce a feature diagram that captures the key components and their relationships in the domain of source code indexing. We then present an experiment to examine the features of the diagram and their dependencies. Results show that utilizing comments has a significant effect on traceability link generation, and stemming is required when comments are considered.

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An entropy-based complexity measure for object-oriented designs

Bansiya

Davis

Etzkorn

1999

Theory Pract. Obj. Syst.

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The use of entropy as a measure of information content has led to its use in measuring the code complexity of functionally developed software products; however, no similar capability exists for evaluating complexities of object‐oriented systems using entropy. In this paper a new metric based on entropy as a complexity measure for object‐oriented classes is defined and validated using several large commercial object‐oriented projects. The metric is computed using information available in class definitions. The new complexity measure of classes is correlated with traditional complexity measures such as McCabe's cyclomatic metric and the number‐of‐defects metric, both of which were evaluated from the implementation of the methods of the classes. The correlation study used the final versions of the class definitions. The high degree of positive correlation between the entropy‐based class definition measure and the traditional measures of class implementation complexity verify that the new entropy measure computed from class definitions can be used as a predictive measure for class implementation complexities provided the class definitions do not change significantly during the implementation. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

show abstract

Automatically identifying reusable OO legacy code

Cited by 72 publications

References 5 publications

An approach to program understanding by natural language understanding

An approach to program understanding by natural language understanding

Source code indexing for automated tracing

An entropy-based complexity measure for object-oriented designs

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