DocumentCode :
3337191
Title :
Feature-to-Code Traceability in Legacy Software Variants
Author :
Eyal-Salman, Hamzeh ; Seriai, A.-D. ; Dony, Christophe
Author_Institution :
Univ. of Montpellier, Montpellier, France
fYear :
2013
fDate :
4-6 Sept. 2013
Firstpage :
57
Lastpage :
61
Abstract :
Existing similar software variants, developed by ad-hoc reuse technique such as left clone-and-own right, represent a starting point to build a software product line (SPL) core assets. To re-engineer such legacy software variants into an SPL for systematic reuse, it is important to be able to identify a mapping between features and their implementing source code elements in different variants. Information Retrieval (IR) methods have been used widely to support this mapping in a single software product. This paper proposes a new approach to improve the performance of IR methods when they are applied to a collection of software variants. The novelty of our approach is twofold. On the one hand, it exploits what software variants have in common and how they differ to improve the accuracy of IR results. On the other hand, it reduces the abstraction gap between features and source code by introducing an intermediate level called left code-topic right, for increasing the number of retrieved links that are relevant. We have applied our approach to a collection of seven variants of a large-scale system by using the ArgoUML-SPL modeling tool. The experimental results showed that our approach outperforms conventional application of IR methods as well as the most recent and relevant work on the subject.
Keywords :
information retrieval; large-scale systems; product development; program diagnostics; software maintenance; software reusability; ArgoUML-SPL modeling tool; IR methods; abstraction gap reduction; code-topic; feature-to-code traceability; information retrieval; large-scale system; legacy software variants; software product line; source code elements; Accuracy; Context; Information retrieval; Large scale integration; Lattices; Software; Vectors; FCA; LSI; Traceability; VSM; features; object-oriented; product line; software variants; source code;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), 2013 39th EUROMICRO Conference on
Conference_Location :
Santander
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/SEAA.2013.65
Filename :
6619489
Link To Document :
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