Using natural language program analysis to locate and understand action-oriented concerns

  • Authors:

  • David Shepherd;Zachary P. Fry;Emily Hill;Lori Pollock;K. Vijay-Shanker

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware;University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware;University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware;University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware;University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Most current software systems contain undocumented high-level ideas implemented across multiple files and modules. When developers perform program maintenance tasks, they often waste time and effort locating and understanding these scattered concerns. We have developed a semi-automated concern location and comprehension tool, Find-Concept, designed to reduce the time developers spend on maintenance tasks and to increase their confidence in the results of these tasks. Find-Concept is effective because it searches a unique natural language-based representation of source code, uses novel techniques to expand initial queries into more effective queries, and displays search results in an easy-to-comprehend format. We describe the Find-Concept tool, the underlying program analysis, and an experimental study comparing Find-Concept's search effectiveness with two state-of-the-art lexical and information retrieval-based search tools. Across nine action-oriented concern location tasks derived from open source bug reports, our Eclipse-based tool produced more effective queries more consistently than either competing search tool with similar user effort.