Abstract

One of the most important steps towards e€ective software maintenance of a large complicated system is to understand how program features are spread over the entire system and their interactions with the program components. However, we must ®rst be able to represent an abstract feature in terms of some concrete program components. In this paper, we use an execution slice-based technique to identify the basic blocks which are used to implement a program feature. Three metrics are then de®ned, based on this identi®cation, to determine quantitatively, the disparity between a program component and a feature, the concentration of a feature in a program component, and the dedication of a program component to a feature. The computations of these metrics are automated by incorporating them in a tool (vSuds), which makes the use of our metrics immediately applicable in real-life contexts. We demonstrate the e€ectiveness of our technique by experimenting with a reliability and performance evaluator. Results of our study suggest that these metrics can provide an indication of the closeness between a feature and a program component which is very

Citations