Feature-to-code traceability in a collection of software variants: Combining formal concept analysis and information retrieval

H. E. Salman, A. Seriai, C. Dony
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引用次数: 41

Abstract

Today, developing new software variant to meet new demands of customers by ad-hoc copying of already existing variants of a software system is a frequent phenomenon in the software industry. Typically, maintaining such variants becomes difficult and expensive over the time. To re-engineer such software variants into a software product line (SPL) for systematic reuse, it is important to identify source code elements that implement a specific feature in order to understand product variants code. Information Retrieval(IR) methods have been used widely to support this purpose in a single software. This paper proposes a new approach to improve the performance of IR methods in a collection of similar software variants. Our proposal produces following two improvements. First, increasing the accuracy of IR results by exploiting commonality and variability across software variants. Secondly, increasing the number of retrieved links that are relevant by reducing the abstraction gap between feature and source code levels. We have validated our approach with a set of variants of two different systems. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach outperforms the conventional application of IR as well as the most relevant work on the subject.
软件变体集合中的功能到代码的可追溯性:结合形式概念分析和信息检索
今天,开发新的软件变体来满足客户的新需求,通过对软件系统已经存在的变体进行临时复制是软件行业中经常出现的现象。通常,随着时间的推移,维护这些变体变得困难和昂贵。为了将这样的软件变体重新设计成软件产品线(SPL)以进行系统重用,为了理解产品变体代码,识别实现特定特性的源代码元素是很重要的。为了在单个软件中支持这一目的,信息检索(IR)方法得到了广泛的应用。本文提出了一种新的方法来提高红外方法在类似软件变体集合中的性能。我们的建议产生以下两点改进。首先,通过利用软件变体之间的共性和可变性来提高IR结果的准确性。其次,通过减少特性和源代码级别之间的抽象差距来增加相关的检索链接的数量。我们已经用两个不同系统的一组变体验证了我们的方法。实验结果表明,所提出的方法优于传统的红外应用,也优于该主题的大多数相关工作。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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