Automatic generation of suggestions for program investigation

ABSTRACT

Before performing a modification task, a developer usually has to investigate the source code of a system to understand how to carry out the task. Discovering the code relevant to a change task is costly because it is an inherently human activity whose success depends on a large number of unpredictable factors, such as intuition and luck. Although studies have shown that effective developers tend to explore a program by following structural dependencies, no methodology is available to guide their navigation through the typically hundreds of dependency paths found in a non-trivial program. In this paper, we propose a technique to automatically propose and rank program elements that are potentially interesting to a developer investigating source code. Our technique is based on an analysis of the topology of structural dependencies in a program. It takes as input a set of program elements of interest to a developer and produces a fuzzy set describing other elements of potential interest. Empirical evaluation of our technique indicates that it can help developers quickly select program elements worthy of investigation while avoiding less interesting ones.

REFERENCES

• 1: Hiralal Agrawal , Joseph R. Horgan, Dynamic program slicing, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1990 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.246-256, June 1990, White Plains, New York, United States
• 2: G. Antoniol , G. Canfora , A. de Lucia , E. Merlo, Recovering Code to Documentation Links in OO System, Proceedings of the Sixth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, p.136, October 06-08, 1999
• 3: Ted J. Biggerstaff , Bharat G. Mitbander , Dallas E. Webster, Program understanding and the concept assignment problem, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.5, p.72-82, May 1994 [doi>10.1145/175290.175300]
• 4: B. W. Boehm. Software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 12(25):1226--1242, 1976.
• 5: Kunrong Chen , Václav Rajlich, Case Study of Feature Location Using Dependence Graph, Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Program Comprehension, p.241, June 10-11, 2000
• 6: Alexander Egyed, Resolving uncertainties during trace analysis, Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGSOFT twelfth international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, October 31-November 06, 2004, Newport Beach, CA, USA
• 7: Thomas Eisenbarth , Rainer Koschke , Daniel Simon, Locating Features in Source Code, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.29 n.3, p.210-224, March 2003 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2003.1183929]
• 8: Keith Gallagher, Visual Impact Analysis, Proceedings of the 1996 International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.52-58, November 04-08, 1996
• 9: Keith Brian Gallagher , James R. Lyle, Using Program Slicing in Software Maintenance, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.17 n.8, p.751-761, August 1991 [doi>10.1109/32.83912]
• 10: Tibor Gyimóthy , Árpád Beszédes , Istán Forgács, An efficient relevant slicing method for debugging, Proceedings of the 7th European software engineering conference held jointly with the 7th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.303-321, September 06-10, 1999, Toulouse, France
• 11: Daniel Jackson , Eugene J. Rollins, A new model of program dependences for reverse engineering, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.2-10, December 06-09, 1994, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
• 12: Mik Kersten , Gail C. Murphy, Mylar: a degree-of-interest model for IDEs, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.159-168, March 14-18, 2005, Chicago, Illinois [doi>10.1145/1052898.1052912]
• 13: Philippe Kruchten, The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2000
• 14: Object Technology International, Inc. Eclipse platform technical overview. White Paper, 2001.
• 15: Martin P. Robillard , Wesley Coelho , Gail C. Murphy, How Effective Developers Investigate Source Code: An Exploratory Study, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.30 n.12, p.889-903, December 2004 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2004.101]
• 16: Martin P. Robillard , Gail C. Murphy, Concern graphs: finding and describing concerns using structural program dependencies, Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 19-25, 2002, Orlando, Florida [doi>10.1145/581339.581390]
• 17: M. P. Robillard and G. C. Murphy. Automatically inferring concern code from program investigation activities. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pages 225--234, 2003.
• 18: Gregor Snelting, Concept analysis—a new framework for program understanding, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering, p.1-10, June 16-16, 1998, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• 19: F. Tip. A survey of program slicing techniques. Journal of Programming Languages, 3(3):121--189, 1995.
• 20: P. Tonella , G. Antoniol , R. Fiutem , E. Merlo, Variable Precision Reaching Definitions Analysis for Software Maintenance, Proceedings of the 1st Euromicro Working Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR '97), p.60, March 17-19, 1997
• 21: M. Weiser. Program slicing. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 10(4):352--357, 1984.
• 22: Norman Wilde , Michael C. Scully, Software reconnaissance: mapping program features to code, Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice, v.7 n.1, p.49-62, Jan.-Feb. 1995 [doi>10.1002/smr.4360070105]
• 23: Annie T. T. Ying , Gail C. Murphy , Raymond Ng , Mark C. Chu-Carroll, Predicting Source Code Changes by Mining Change History, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.30 n.9, p.574-586, September 2004 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2004.52]
• 24: Wei Zhao , Lu Zhang , Yin Liu , Jiasu Sun , Fuqing Yang, SNIAFL: Towards a Static Non-Interactive Approach to Feature Location, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, p.293-303, May 23-28, 2004
• 25: H.-J. Zimmermann, Fuzzy set theory—and its applications (3rd ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, 1996
• 26: Thomas Zimmermann , Peter Weisgerber , Stephan Diehl , Andreas Zeller, Mining Version Histories to Guide Software Changes, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, p.563-572, May 23-28, 2004

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Restructuring, reverse engineering, and reengineering

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
feature location, static analysis, structural program dependencies