Tracking Concerns in Evolving Source Code: An Empirical Study

Abstract

The association between the description of a concern (e.g., a feature) and the code that implements it is valuable information that can degrade as the code of a system evolves. We present a study of the evolution of the implementation of a concern in 33 versions of an open-source text editor. We represented the implementation of the concern using concern graphs, a model that was designed to be resilient to source code evolution. The study showed how the concern graph model supports tracking a concern's implementation in an evolving system, as well as inferring high-level past changes and assessing the stability of the concern's implementation