• 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