Using natural language program analysis to locate and understand action-oriented concerns

Most current software systems contain undocumented high-level ideas implemented across multiple files and modules. When developers perform program maintenance tasks, they often waste time and effort locating and understanding these scattered concerns. We have developed a semi-automated concern location and comprehension tool, Find-Concept, designed to reduce the time developers spend on maintenance tasks and to increase their confidence in the results of these tasks. Find-Concept is effective because it searches a unique natural language-based representation of source code, uses novel techniques to expand initial queries into more effective queries, and displays search results in an easy-to-comprehend format. We describe the Find-Concept tool, the underlying program analysis, and an experimental study comparing Find-Concept's search effectiveness with two state-of-the-art lexical and information retrieval-based search tools. Across nine action-oriented concern location tasks deri...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AOSD
• Authors: David Shepherd, Zachary P. Fry, Emily Hill, Lori L. Pollock, K. Vijay-Shanker
• Keywords: AOSD 2007, Effective Queries, Maintenance Tasks, Program Maintenance Tasks, Software Engineering