Improving Feature Location by Enhancing Source Code with Stereotypes

A novel approach to improve feature location by enhancing the corpus (i.e., source code) with static information is presented. An information retrieval method, namely Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), is used for feature location. Adding stereotype information to each method/function enhances the corpus. Stereotypes are terms that describe the abstract role of a method, for example get, set, and predicate are well-known method stereotypes. Each method in the system is automatically stereotyped via a static-analysis approach. Experimental comparisons of using LSI for feature location with, and without, stereotype information are conducted on a set of open-source systems. The results show that the added information improves the recall and precision in the context of feature location. Moreover, the use of stereotype information decreases the total effort that a developer would need to expend to locate relevant methods of the feature.