Article

Supporting program comprehension using semantic and structural information

Authors:

Jonathan I. Maletic,

Andrian MarcusAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '01: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering

Pages 103 - 112

Published: 01 July 2001 Publication History

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Abstract

The paper focuses on investigating the combined use of semantic and structural information of programs to support the comprehension tasks involved in the maintenance and reengineering of software systems. Here, semantic refers to the domain specific issues (both problem and development domains) of a software system. The other dimension, structural, refers to issues such as the actual syntactic structure of the program along with the control and data flow that it represents. An advanced information retrieval method, latent semantic indexing, is used to define a semantic similarity measure between software components. Components within a software system are then clustered together using this similarity measure. Simple structural information (i.e., file organization) of the software system is then used to assess the semantic cohesion of the clusters and files, with respect to each other. The measures are formally defined for general application. A set of experiments is presented which demonstrates how these measures can assist in the understanding of a nontrivial software system, namely a version of NCSA Mosaic.

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Cited By

Alsuhaibani RNewman CDecker MCollard MMaletic J(2021)On the Naming of MethodsProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00061(587-599)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
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Index Terms

Supporting program comprehension using semantic and structural information

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cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '01: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering

July 2001

844 pages

ISBN:0769510507

Chairman:
Hausi A. Müller
Univ. of Victoria, Canada

Copyright © Copyright (c) 2001 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved.

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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IEEE Computer Society

United States

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Published: 01 July 2001

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ICSE01: 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering

May 12 - 19, 2001

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ICSE '01 Paper Acceptance Rate 47 of 268 submissions, 18%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00061
LeClair AJiang SMcMillan CAtlee JBultan TWhittle J(2019)A neural model for generating natural language summaries of program subroutinesProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2019.00087(795-806)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00087
Zhang JWang XZhang HSun HWang KLiu XAtlee JBultan TWhittle J(2019)A novel neural source code representation based on abstract syntax treeProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2019.00086(783-794)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00086
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