DocumentCode
3342688
Title
Recovering code to documentation links in OO systems
Author
Antoniol, G. ; Canfora, G. ; De Lucia, A. ; Merlo, E.
Author_Institution
Fac. of Eng., Univ. of Sannio, Benevento, Italy
fYear
1999
fDate
6-8 Oct 1999
Firstpage
136
Lastpage
144
Abstract
Software system documentation is almost always expressed informally, in natural language and free text. Examples include requirement specifications, design documents, user manual pages, system development journals, error logs and related maintenance reports. We propose an approach to establish and maintain traceability links between the source code and free-text documents. A premise of our work is that programmers use meaningful names for program´s items, such as functions, variables, types, classes and methods. We believe that the application domain knowledge that programmers process when writing the code is often captured by the mnemonics for identifiers; therefore, the analysis of these mnemonics can help to associate high-level concepts with program concepts, and vice versa. In this paper, the approach is applied to software written in an object-oriented (OO) language, namely C++, to trace classes to manual sections
Keywords
configuration management; naming services; object-oriented programming; reverse engineering; system documentation; user manuals; C++ language; application domain knowledge; design documents; error logs; free-text documents; high-level concepts; mnemonics; natural language; object-oriented systems; program classes; program code writing; program concepts; program functions; program item names; program methods; program types; program variables; program version compliance checking; requirement specifications; software maintenance reports; source code-to-documentation link recovery; system development journals; traceability links; user manual pages; user manual sections; Cognition; Computer industry; Context modeling; Documentation; Mathematics; Natural languages; Programming profession; Software maintenance; Software systems; Writing;
fLanguage
English
Publisher
ieee
Conference_Titel
Reverse Engineering, 1999. Proceedings. Sixth Working Conference on
Conference_Location
Atlanta, GA
Print_ISBN
0-7695-0303-9
Type
conf
DOI
10.1109/WCRE.1999.806954
Filename
806954
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