Incremental Feature Location and Identification in Source Code

Feature location (FL) in source code is an important task for program understanding. Existing dynamic FL techniques depend on sufficient scenarios for exercising the features to be located. However, it is difficult to prepare such scenarios because it involves a correct understanding of the features. This paper proposes an incremental technique for refining the identification of features integrated with the existing FL technique using formal concept analysis. In our technique, we classify the differences of static and dynamic dependencies of method invocations based on their relevance to the identified features. According to the classification, the technique suggests method invocations to exercise unexplored part of the features. An application example indicates the effectiveness of the approach.