On the proactive identification of mistakes on concern mapping tasks

Abstract

1. RESEARCH PROBLEM AND MOTIVATION The activity of explicitly assigning a stakeholder’s concern to its corresponding elements in the source code is known as concern mapping (or concern assignment) [1]. This is one of the most recurring and common activities in software maintenance tasks. Even though many techniques (Section 3.1) partially support concern identification [2-5], the developers are always forced to exhaustively verify if the mappings are correct and complete. Otherwise, the developers can unwittingly miss or implement incorrect changes in the system modules. In addition, existing tools usually support concern identification only at the class and method level, which are not sufficient for many software change tasks.