Coevolution of code feature dictionary and software comprehension domain

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26540169
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Library and information science/Humanistic social informatics
• Research Institution: The University of Electro-Communications
• Principal Investigator: Maekawa Mamoru 電気通信大学, その他部局等, 名誉教授 (10126162)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 抽象構文木 / 検索 / アノテーション

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Understanding unfamiliar source code is inherently difficult for a software engineer, despite its importance. It is, however, still hard for a system to help in this activity, for lack of ways of both representing semantic chunks and of preparing a rich dictionary of chunks.
This research proposed an integrated framework for annotating and searching source code. In the framework, each engineer gathers (annotates) semantic chunks that have the same meaning and interactively generalizes them to get a search pattern. As a result, a dictionary of semantic chunks together with their search patterns is incrementally created through engineer collaboration. Two representations are used: a tuple of nodes of an abstract syntax tree (AST) for a semantic chunk and a classifier on generative attribute vectors for search patterns.

Free Research Field

ソフトウェア工学