Using Topic Models to Support Software Maintenance

Our recent research has shown that the latent information found by commonly used topic models generally relates to the development history of a software system. While it is not always possible to associate these latent topics with human-oriented concepts, it is demonstrable that they identify historical maintenance relationships in source code. Specifically, when a developer makes a change to a software project, it is common for a significant part of that change to relate to a single latent topic. A significant conclusion can be drawn from this: latent topic models identify co-maintenance relationships with no supervision, and therefore topic models can be used to support the maintenance phase of software development.