Query-based configuration of text retrieval solutions for software engineering tasks

Moreno, Laura; Bavota, Gabriele; Haiduc, Sonia; Penta, Massimiliano Di; Oliveto, Rocco; Russo, Barbara; Marcus, Andrian

doi:10.1145/2786805.2786859

Cited by 39 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…A line of work on facilitating information discoverability includes work by Moreno at al., as well as Martie at al., who propose solutions for improving code search capabilities [36,34]. There are also approaches that aim to reduce information overhead in issuetracking systems [2,8] and in change management systems [41].…”

Section: Existing Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The challenges of staying together while moving fast

Rubin

Rinard

2016

Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering

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We report on the results of an empirical study conducted with 35 experienced software developers from 22 high-tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, and others. The goal of the study was to elicit challenges that these developers face, potential solutions that they envision to these challenges, and research initiatives that they think would deliver useful results.Challenges identified by the majority of the study participants relate to the collaborative nature of the work: the availability and discoverability of information, communication, collaborative planning and integration with work of others. Almost all participants also addressed the advantages and disadvantages of the current "fast to the market" trend, and the toll it takes on the quality of the software that they are able to deliver and on their professional and personal satisfaction as software engineers.We describe in depth the identified challenges, supporting our findings with explicit quotes from the study participants. We also put these findings in context of work done by the software engineering community and outline a roadmap for possible future research initiatives.

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Section: Existing Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several existing works propose approaches for better code management, which include summarizing and explaining code [43], API usage [36,42,39], managing integration conflicts [38], and commits in version control systems [27,1,32,37].…”

Section: Existing Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The challenges of staying together while moving fast

Rubin

Rinard

2016

Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering

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“…It is possible that the optimal parameters may differ between weighting configurations. It is also possible that the optimal configuration may differ between queries . While finding the optimal configuration for LDA should look at both weighting schemes and parameters together, the focus of this paper is not on finding the optimal solution but instead on showing the effect that different weighting configurations can have on an FLT.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is also possible that the optimal configuration may differ between queries. 45 While finding the optimal configuration for LDA should look at both weighting schemes and parameters together, the focus of this paper is not on finding the optimal solution but instead on showing the effect that different weighting configurations can have on an FLT. However, a basic understanding of how different parameters may affect the results of this study are important.…”

Section: Configuring Lda For Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of structural weighting on a latent Dirichlet allocation–based feature location technique

Eddy

Kraft

Gray

2017

J Software Evolu Process

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Text retrieval-based feature location techniques (FLTs) use information from the terms present in documents in classes and methods. However, relevant terms originating from certain locations (eg, method names) often comprise only a small part of the entire method lexicon. Feature location techniques should benefit from techniques that make greater use of this information. The primary objective of this study was to investigate how weighting terms from different locations in source code can improve a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based FLT. We conducted an empirical study of 4 subject software systems and 372 features. For each subject system, we trained 1024 different LDA models with new weighting schemes applied to leading comments, method names, parameters, body comments, and local variables. We conducted both a quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify the effects of using the weighting schemes on the performance of the LDA-based FLT. We evaluated weighting schemes based on mean reciprocal rank and spread of effectiveness measures. In addition, we conducted a factorial analysis to identify which locations have a main impact on the results of the FLT. We then examined the effects of adding information from class comments, class names, and fields to the top 10 configurations for each system. This results in an additional 640 different LDA models for each system. From our results, we identified a significant effect in the performance of an LDA-based weighting configuration when applying our weighting schemes to the LDA-based FLT. Furthermore, we found that adding information from each method's containing class can improve the effectiveness of an LDA-based FLT. Finally, we identified a set of recommendations for identifying better weighting schemes for LDA. KEYWORDSfeature location, program comprehension, static analysis, term weighting, text retrieval INTRODUCTIONSoftware features are functionalities that are accessible to developers and users. During the evolution of a software system, developers change the source code to add new features, enhance existing features, and remove defective features (bugs). When developers are tasked with changing the source code of a large or unfamiliar system, they must spend considerable time and effort on program comprehension activities to gain the knowledge needed to implement changes. Part of this process is called feature location, a software evolution task in which a developer locates the source code entities (eg, methods and classes) that implement a functionality (feature). 1 During software evolution, developers must perform feature location to identify the entities needed to add new functionalities, modify existing functionalities, or remove defects.Given the scale of modern software systems, manual feature location is impractical. built from one of these techniques does not contain information regarding the originating element of a term (eg, method name, local variable, and parameter), but rather contains only the (preprocessed) terms. The impacts o...

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“…Existing studies apply relevance feedback from developers [16], pseudo-relevance feedback from IR tools [21], partial phrasal matching [23,44], and machine learning [21,34] to query reformulation. They also make use of context of query terms from source code [25,40,49,53], text retrieval configuration [21,34], and quality of queries [19,20] in suggesting the reformulated queries.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improved query reformulation for concept location using CodeRank and document structures

Rahman

Roy

2017

Preprint

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Abstract-During software maintenance, developers usually deal with a significant number of software change requests. As a part of this, they often formulate an initial query from the request texts, and then attempt to map the concepts discussed in the request to relevant source code locations in the software system (a.k.a., concept location). Unfortunately, studies suggest that they often perform poorly in choosing the right search terms for a change task. In this paper, we propose a novel technique -ACERthat takes an initial query, identifies appropriate search terms from the source code using a novel term weight -CodeRank, and then suggests effective reformulation to the initial query by exploiting the source document structures, query quality analysis and machine learning. Experiments with 1,675 baseline queries from eight subject systems report that our technique can improve 71% of the baseline queries which is highly promising. Comparison with five closely related existing techniques in query reformulation not only validates our empirical findings but also demonstrates the superiority of our technique.

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Query-based configuration of text retrieval solutions for software engineering tasks

Cited by 39 publications

References 46 publications

The challenges of staying together while moving fast

The challenges of staying together while moving fast

Impact of structural weighting on a latent Dirichlet allocation–based feature location technique

Improved query reformulation for concept location using CodeRank and document structures

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