A support system for helping to understand a project in software maintenance using the program package name

Under the global competition of business, software development is required to be conducted more efficiently. In particular, software maintenance holds the majority in the costs of software development. Developers must understand a project to conduct software maintenance efficiently. Therefore this study develops a support system for understanding a project in software maintenance. This study proposes to use the program package name. To utilize function name as the program package name is required. By using the name, the system extracts associations with parts of functional specification. Furthermore, based on the cosine similarity using the vector space model between design documents or communication messages and the parts extracted by the program package name, related artifacts are recommended by the system.