Title:
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Exploring the Neighborhood with Dora to Expedite Software Maintenance
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Authors:
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Emily Hill, Lori Pollock, and K. Vijay-Shanker
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Abstract:
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Completing software maintenance and evolution tasks for
today's large, complex software systems can be difficult, often
requiring considerable time to understand the system
well enough to make correct changes. Despite evidence that
successful programmers use program structure as well as
identifier names to explore software, most existing program
exploration techniques use either structural or lexical identifier
information. By using only one type of information,
automated tools ignore valuable clues about a developer's
intentions--clues critical to the human program comprehension
process. In this paper, we present and evaluate a
technique that exploits both program structure and lexical
information to help programmers more effectively explore
programs. Our approach uses structural information to focus
automated program exploration and lexical information
to prune irrelevant structure edges from consideration. For
the important program exploration step of expanding from
a seed, our experimental results demonstrate that an integrated
lexical- and structural-based approach is significantly
more effective than a state-of-the-art structural program exploration
technique.
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Publisher:
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IEEE/ACM
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Book Title:
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22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)
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Date:
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November 2007
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Project:
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Natural Language Program Analysis
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Document Type:
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Conference Proceedings
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Key Words:
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Natural language program analysis, program exploration, software maintenance, software tools
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Files:
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[presentation slides: Adobe PDF] (40499 KB)
[preprint: Adobe PDF] (179 KB)
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Bibtex Entry:
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| @inproceedings{123456789/184, |
| author = {Emily Hill and Lori Pollock and K. Vijay-Shanker}, |
| title = {Exploring the Neighborhood with Dora to Expedite Software Maintenance}, |
| booktitle = {22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)}, |
| publisher = {IEEE/ACM}, |
| month = {November}, |
| year = {2007} |
| } |
|