Feature location in source code: a taxonomy and survey

Dit, Bogdan; Revelle, Meghan; Gethers, Malcom; Poshyvanyk, Denys

doi:10.1002/smr.567

Cited by 432 publications

(408 citation statements)

References 139 publications

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“…Admittedly mapping code to feature-based vertices would be difficult, based on their delocalization in the code-base [60] the finely-grained nature of this delocalization and the difficulty in locating features in code, in general. These observations suggest that (O2) the current mapping facilities (drag-and-drop from the package explorer, as in JITTAC or regular-expression descriptions, as in the jRMTool [61] ) may need to be enhanced to help achieve this mapping and that (O3) the envisaged tooling might benefit from providing support for feature location [62].…”

Section: What System Perspectives Are Of Particular Interest To Archimentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Buckley

Alí

English

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

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ContextReflexion Modelling is considered one of the more successful approaches to architecture reconciliation. Empirical studies strongly suggest that professional developers involved in real-life industrial projects find the information provided by variants of this approach useful and insightful, but the degree to which it resolves architecture conformance issues is still unclear. ObjectiveThis paper aims to assess the level of architecture conformance achieved by professional architects using Reflexion Modelling, and to determine how the approach could be extended to improve its suitability for this task. MethodAn in-vivo, multi-case-study protocol was adopted across five software systems, from four different financial services organizations. Think-aloud, video-tape and interview data from professional architects involved in Reflexion Modelling sessions were analysed qualitatively. ResultsThis study showed that (at least) four months after the Reflexion Modelling sessions less than 50% of the architectural violations identified were removed. The majority of participants who did remove violations favoured changes to the architectural model rather than to the code. Participants seemed to work off two specific architectural templates, and interactively explored their architectural model to focus in on the causes of violations, and to assess the ramifications of potential code changes. They expressed a desire for dependency analysis beyond static-source-code analysis and scalable visualizations. ConclusionThe findings support several interesting usage-in-practice traits, previously hinted at in the literature. These include 1) the iterative analysis of systems through Reflexion models, as a precursor to possible code change or as a focusing mechanism to identify the location of architecture conformance issues, 2) the extension of the approach with respect to dependency analysis of software systems and architectural modelling templates, 3) improved visualization support and 4) the insight that identification of architectural violations in itself does not lead to their removal in the majority of instances.

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Section: What System Perspectives Are Of Particular Interest To Archimentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Buckley

Alí

English

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

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“…IR-based methods have been applied to support practical tasks. For instance, IR methods have been successfully used to support feature location (Liu et al 2007;Eaddy et al 2008;Revelle and Poshyvanyk 2009;Revelle et al 2010;Dit et al 2012a;Dit et al 2012b;, traceability link recovery (Antoniol et al 2002;Hayes et al 2006;De Lucia et al 2007;Cleland-Huang et al 2010;Oliveto et al 2010;Gethers et al 2011), and impact analysis (Antoniol et al 2000;Canfora and Cerulo 2005;Poshyvanyk et al 2009;Gethers and Poshyvanyk 2010;Gethers et al 2012). We do not discuss other applications of IR-based techniques in the context of software maintenance due to space limitations; however, interested readers are referred to (Binkley and Lawrie 2010a;Binkley and Lawrie 2010b) for such an overview.…”

Section: Conceptual Information In Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating conceptual and logical couplings for change impact analysis in software

2012

Self Cite

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The paper presents an approach that combines conceptual and evolutionary techniques to support change impact analysis in source code. Conceptual couplings capture the extent to which domain concepts and software artifacts are related to each other. This information is derived using Information Retrieval based analysis of textual software artifacts that are found in a single version of software (e.g., comments and identifiers in a single snapshot of source code). Evolutionary couplings capture the extent to which software artifacts were co-changed. This information is derived from analyzing patterns, relationships, and relevant information of source code changes mined from multiple versions in software repositories. The premise is that such combined methods provide improvements to the accuracy of impact sets compared to the two individual approaches.A rigorous empirical assessment on the changes of the open source systems Apache httpd, ArgoUML, iBatis, KOffice, and jEdit is also reported. The impact sets are evaluated at the file and method levels of granularity for all the software systems considered in the empirical evaluation.The results show that a combination of conceptual and evolutionary techniques, across several cutoff points and periods of history, provides statistically significant improvements in accuracy over either of the two techniques used independently. Improvements in F-measure values of up to 14%(from 3% to 17%) over the conceptual technique in ArgoUML at the method granularity, and up to 21% over the evolutionary technique in iBatis (from 9% to 30%) at the file granularity were reported.

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“…During software development and maintenance, developers mainly depend on a source code search engine to locate the different parts of a software library [1]. The tasks for which code search is carried out include concept localization, bug localization, traceability link recovery, code comprehension, etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assisting code search with automatic Query Reformulation for bug localization

Sisman

Kak

2013

2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

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Abstract-Source code retrieval plays an important role in many software engineering tasks. However, designing a query that can accurately retrieve the relevant software artifacts can be challenging for developers as it requires a certain level of knowledge and experience regarding the code base. This paper demonstrates how the difficulty of designing a proper query can be alleviated through automatic Query Reformulation (QR) -an under-the-hood operation for reformulating a user's query with no additional input from the user. The proposed QR framework works by enriching a user's search query with certain specific additional terms drawn from the highest-ranked artifacts retrieved in response to the initial query. The important point here is that these additional terms injected into a query are those that are deemed to be "close" to the original query terms in the source code on the basis of positional proximity. This similarity metric is based on the notion that terms that deal with the same concepts in source code are usually proximal to one another in the same files. We demonstrate the superiority of our QR framework in relation to the QR frameworks wellknown in the natural language document retrieval by showing significant improvements in bug localization performance for two large software projects using more than 4,000 queries.

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Feature location in source code: a taxonomy and survey

Cited by 432 publications

References 139 publications

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Integrating conceptual and logical couplings for change impact analysis in software

Assisting code search with automatic Query Reformulation for bug localization

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