Evolving Ispell: a case study of program understanding for reuse

Author

Aversano, Lerina ; Canfora, Gerardo ; De Lucia, Andrea ; Stefanucci, Silvio

Author_Institution

Dept. of Eng., Univ. of Sannio, Benevento, Italy

fYear

2002

fDate

2002

Firstpage

197

Lastpage

206

Abstract

Text processing has proven helpful in a number of software engineering tasks. We discuss how a morphological analyser for the Italian language, and its associated linguistic resources, have been developed by reusing and evolving an existing system, Ispell, which is an open-source spell-checker. The need to develop such an analyser derives from the need to improve the traceability link recovery process described by G. Antoniol et al. (2000, 2002). This paper shows how the program understanding exercise was useful to develop a system in a specialized application domain in which we had a very limited background knowledge.

Keywords

computer aided analysis; linguistics; public domain software; reverse engineering; software reusability; spelling aids; text analysis; Ispell system evolution; Italian language; case study; limited background knowledge; linguistic resources; morphological analyser; open-source spell-checker; program understanding; software engineering; software reuse; specialized application domain; text processing; traceability link recovery process; Application software; Computer aided software engineering; Data mining; Indexing; Information retrieval; Programming profession; Software engineering; Software maintenance; Stress; Text processing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Program Comprehension, 2002. Proceedings. 10th International Workshop on

ISSN

1092-8138

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1495-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WPC.2002.1021341

Filename

1021341