Dynamic Feature Traces: Finding Features in Unfamiliar Code

This paper introduces an automated technique for feature location: helping developers map features to relevant source code. Like several other automated feature location techniques, ours is based on execution-trace analysis. We hypothesize that these prior techniques, which rely on making binary judgments about a code element’s relevance to a feature, are overly sensitive to the quality of the input. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a more robust alternative, whose most distinguishing characteristic is that it employs ranking heuristics to determine a code element’s relevance to a feature. We believe that our technique is less sensitive with respect to the quality of the input and we claim that it is more effective when used by developers unfamiliar with the target system. We validate our claim by applying our technique to three open sourced software systems and five actual tasks, comparing these results to the results of an existing technique. Each of these syst...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICSM
• Authors: Andrew David Eisenberg, Kris De Volder
• Keywords: Code Element, Feature Location, Feature Location Techniques, ICSM 2005, Software Engineering