research-article

Topology analysis of software dependencies

Author:

Martin P. RobillardAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 17, Issue 4

Article No.: 18, Pages 1 - 36

https://doi.org/10.1145/13487689.13487691

Published: 25 August 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Before performing a modification task, a developer usually has to investigate the source code of a system to understand how to carry out the task. Discovering the code relevant to a change task is costly because it is a human activity whose success depends on a large number of unpredictable factors, such as intuition and luck. Although studies have shown that effective developers tend to explore a program by following structural dependencies, no methodology is available to guide their navigation through the thousands of dependency paths found in a nontrivial program. We describe a technique to automatically propose and rank program elements that are potentially interesting to a developer investigating source code. Our technique is based on an analysis of the topology of structural dependencies in a program. It takes as input a set of program elements of interest to a developer and produces a fuzzy set describing other elements of potential interest. Empirical evaluation of our technique indicates that it can help developers quickly select program elements worthy of investigation while avoiding less interesting ones.

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Cited By

Etaiwi LSager PGuéhéneuc YHamel S(2024)Consensus task interaction trace recommender to guide developers’ software navigationEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10528-729:6Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
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Wang YLin YWan ZYang X(2023)Task Context: A Tool for Predicting Code Context Models for Software Development Tasks2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion)10.1109/ICSE-Companion58688.2023.00045(156-160)Online publication date: May-2023
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Michelon GMartinez JSotto-Mayor BArrieta AAssunção WAbreu REgyed A(2023)Spectrum-based feature localization for families of systemsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2022.111532195:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2023
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Index Terms

Topology analysis of software dependencies
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Volume 17, Issue 4

August 2008

139 pages

ISSN:1049-331X

EISSN:1557-7392

DOI:10.1145/13487689

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 25 August 2008

Accepted: 01 August 2007

Revised: 01 February 2007

Received: 01 March 2006

Published in TOSEM Volume 17, Issue 4

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Cited By

Etaiwi LSager PGuéhéneuc YHamel S(2024)Consensus task interaction trace recommender to guide developers’ software navigationEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10528-729:6Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-024-10528-7
Wang YLin YWan ZYang X(2023)Task Context: A Tool for Predicting Code Context Models for Software Development Tasks2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion)10.1109/ICSE-Companion58688.2023.00045(156-160)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-Companion58688.2023.00045
Michelon GMartinez JSotto-Mayor BArrieta AAssunção WAbreu REgyed A(2023)Spectrum-based feature localization for families of systemsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2022.111532195:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2022.111532
Prokhorenko VIslam CBabar M(2023)Analyzing the Evolution of Inter-package Dependencies in Operating Systems: A Case Study of UbuntuSoftware Architecture10.1007/978-3-031-42592-9_16(233-249)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42592-9_16
Schroeder GSteinmetz CRodrigues RRettberg APereira C(2021)Digital Twin connectivity topologiesIFAC-PapersOnLine10.1016/j.ifacol.2021.08.08654:1(737-742)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2021.08.086
Wan ZMurphy GXia XGrundy JLe Goues CLo D(2020)Predicting code context models for software development tasksProceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3324884.3416544(809-820)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3324884.3416544
Falessi DRoll JGuo JCleland-Huang J(2020)Leveraging Historical Associations between Requirements and Source Code to Identify Impacted ClassesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2018.286173546:4(420-441)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2861735
Razzaq ALe Gear AExton CBuckley J(2020)An empirical assessment of baseline feature location techniquesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-019-09734-525:1(266-321)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2020
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He YLi TWang WLan WLi X(2018)A Structure-Driven Method for Information Retrieval-Based Software Change Impact AnalysisScientific Programming10.1155/2018/54942092018Online publication date: 1-Jan-2018
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Razzaq AWasala AExton CBuckley J(2018)The State of Empirical Evaluation in Static Feature LocationACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/328098828:1(1-58)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2018
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