Concept location identifies parts of a software system that implement a specific concept that originates from the problem or the solution domain. Concept location is a very common software engineering activity that directly supports software maintenance and evolution tasks such as incremental change and reverse engineering. This paper addresses the problem of concept location using an advanced information retrieval method, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). LSI is used to map concepts expressed in natural language by the programmer to the relevant parts of the source code. Results of a case study on NCSA Mosaic are presented and compared with previously published results of other static methods for concept location. 1

execution frequency

Program comprehension is an important activity in software maintenance, as software must be sufficiently understood before it can be properly modified. The study of a program’s execution, known as dynamic analysis, has become a common technique in this respect and has received substantial attention from the research community, particularly over the last decade. These efforts have resulted in

The paper presents a set of tools that work in conjunction to support concept location in software. One of the tools, IRiSS (Information Retrieval based Software Search), is a search engine, designed and implemented to allow searching the source code of a software system. The other tool, sv3D (source viewer 3D), is a visualization front end, designed to represent software data with 3D renderings. The two tools are integrated with MS Visual Studio, with IRiSS providing the infrastructure for indexing the source code and querying, while sv3D helps the user in visually navigating the results of the queries and keeps track of the navigation path.

Change requests are often formulated into concepts or features that a maintainer can understand. One of the main issues faced by a maintainer is to know and locate “where does this program implement feature X”. However, these features are implicitly available in the code and scattered elsewhere that make them undoubtedly difficult to manage. A technique called software reconnaissance was originally inspired by industrial maintainers about the need for better ways of locating software features in large systems. This paper presents the authors ’ experience in using the software reconnaissance technique and tool called RECON2, developed by the university of West Florida. Our objective is to understand how the technique and tool work and to further suggest some enhancements with respect to software understanding strategies.

Many methods and tools for the reengineering of software systems have been developed so far. However, the domain-specific requirements of telecommunication systems have not been addressed sufficiently. These systems are designed in a process- rather than in a data-centered way. Furthermore, analyzing and visualizing dynamic behavior is a key to system understanding. In this paper, we report on tools for the reengineering of telecommunication systems which we have developed in close cooperation with an industrial partner. These tools are based on a variety of techniques for understanding behavior such as visualization of link chains, recovery of state diagrams from the source code, and visualization of traces by different kinds of diagrams. Tool support has been developed step by step in response to the requirements and questions stated by telecommunication experts at Ericsson Eurolab Germany.

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