MASPLAS '07
Using Natural Language Program Analysis to Locate and Understand Action-Oriented Concerns
by Dave Shepherd
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.
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