Intelligent search techniques for large software systems

  • Authors:

  • Huixiang Liu;Timothy C. Lethbridge

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Technology and Engineering, 150 Louis Pasteur, University of Ottawa, K1N 6N5 Canada;School of Information Technology and Engineering, 150 Louis Pasteur, University of Ottawa, K1N 6N5 Canada

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '01 Proceedings of the 2001 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

This paper describes a study of what we call intelligent search techniques as implemented in a software exploration environment, whose purpose is to facilitate software maintenance. The paper first introduces the intelligent search techniques used in our study, including abbreviation contraction and abbreviation expansion. Then it describes in detail the rating algorithms used to evaluate the query results' similarity to the original query strings. Next, we describe a series of experiments we conducted to assess the effectiveness of both the intelligent search methods and our rating algorithms. The experiment involved asking software engineers to evaluate the search results. Finally, we use the analysis of the experimental results to guide our future research.