Tracking Concerns in Evolving Source Code: An Empirical Study

The association between the description of a concern (e.g., a feature) and the code that implements it is valuable information that can degrade as the code of a system evolves. We present a study of the evolution of the implementation of a concern in 33 versions of an open-source text editor. We represented the implementation of the concern using concern graphs, a model that was designed to be resilient to source code evolution. The study showed how the concern graph model supports tracking a concern’s implementation in an evolving system, as well as inferring high-level past changes and assessing the stability of the concern’s implementation.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICSM
• Authors: Martin P. Robillard
• Keywords: Concern Graph, Concern Graph Model, Concern’s Implementation, ICSM 2006, Software Engineering