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SNIAFL: Towards a static noninteractive approach to feature location
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Source ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) archive
Volume 15 ,  Issue 2  (April 2006) table of contents
Pages: 195 - 226  
Year of Publication: 2006
ISSN:1049-331X
Authors
Wei Zhao  Peking University, Beijing, China
Lu Zhang  Peking University, Beijing, China
Yin Liu  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
Jiasu Sun  Peking University, Beijing, China
Fuqing Yang  Peking University, Beijing, China
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
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ABSTRACT

To facilitate software maintenance and evolution, a helpful step is to locate features concerned in a particular maintenance task. In the literature, both dynamic and interactive approaches have been proposed for feature location. In this article, we present a static and noninteractive method for achieving this objective. The main idea of our approach is to use information retrieval (IR) technology to reveal the basic connections between features and computational units in the source code. Due to the imprecision of retrieved connections, we use a static representation of the source code named BRCG (branch-reserving call graph) to further recover both relevant and specific computational units for each feature. A premise of our approach is that programmers should use meaningful names as identifiers. We also performed an experimental study based on two real-world software systems to evaluate our approach. According to experimental results, our approach is quite effective in acquiring the relevant and specific computational units for most features.


REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

 
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CITED BY  11

Collaborative Colleagues:
Wei Zhao: colleagues
Lu Zhang: colleagues
Yin Liu: colleagues
Jiasu Sun: colleagues
Fuqing Yang: colleagues