Software change requests are often formulated as requests to modify or to add a specific feature or concept. To implement these changes, the features or concepts must be located in the code. In this paper, we describe the scenarios of the feature and concept location. The scenarios utilize a computer-assisted search of software dependence graph. Scenarios are demonstrated by a case study of NCSA Mosaic source code. 1. Introduction In software maintenance and evolution, change requirements are often formulated as requests to modify or to add specific program concepts or features [2, 26]. An example of such a request is "Add a new external viewer to Mosaic web browser". Before any actual change can be made to the system, software programmers must locate the implementation of the concepts ("external viewer") in the source code. Concept location is a process that maps domain concepts to the software components. The input is the maintenance request, expressed in natural language and usin...

This paper reports on detailed observations during software enhancement tasks of five programmers enhancing software. The enhancement tasks represent realistic work behavior by industrial programmers. The paper describes the kinds of actions programmers preferred during their task, the level of abstraction at which they were working, and the role of hypotheses in their enhancement strategies. 1 Introduction Understanding software is an important aspect of software maintenance. To enhance performance, add new features, or leverage existing code, a programmer must understand the code well enough to know what changes are needed, how to make them, and how to integrate new code into existing applications. For larger software products, understanding will, by necessity, be partial. Software products typically evolve through successive enhancements. These enhancements vary in size and complexity. Some programmers develop deep knowledge of a product through several enhancement cycles, others ...

Software change requests are often formulated as requests to modify or to add a specific feature or concept. To implement these changes, the features or concepts must be located in the code. In this paper, we describe the scenarios of the feature and concept location. The scenarios utilize a computer-assisted search of software dependence graph. Scenarios are demonstrated by a case study of NCSA Mosaic source code.