Adoption of reverse engineering tools: a cognitive perspective and methodology

Zayour, Iyad; Lethbridge, Timothy C.

doi:10.1109/wpc.2001.921735

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…The amount of software lifecycle effort consumed during this phase has been estimated to range between 60% and 80% of the entire lifecycle effort [1][2][3][4]. While the empirical basis for such statements is dated and suggestions have been made that it should be revisited [4], the increasing scale and complexity of newer software systems [3,5] implies that the effort invested in maintenance of successful systems can only have increased. Thus, research is required towards the discovery and evolution of supportive approaches or tools, which could improve efficiency in this effort-intensive activity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirically-based characterization and quantification of information seeking through mailing lists during Open Source developers’ software evolution

Sharif

English

Alí

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

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ContextSeveral authors have proposed information seeking as an appropriate perspective for studying software evolution. Empirical evidence in this area suggests that substantial time delays can accrue, due to the unavailability of required information, particularly when this information must travel across geographically distributed sites. ObjectiveAs a first step in addressing the time delays that can occur in information seeking for distributed Open Source (OS) programmers during software evolution, this research characterizes the information seeking of OS developers through their mailing lists. MethodA longitudinal study that analyses 17 years of developer mailing list activity in total, over 6 different OS projects is performed, identifying the prevalent information types sought by developers, from a qualitative, grounded analysis of this data. Quantitative analysis of the number-of-responses and response time-lag is also performed. ResultsThe analysis shows that Open Source developers are particularly implementation centric and team focused in their use of mailing lists, mirroring similar findings that have been reported in the literature. However novel findings include the suggestion that OS developers often require support regarding the technology they use during development, that they refer to documentation fairly frequently and that they seek implementation-oriented specifics based on system design principles that they anticipate in advance. In addition, response analysis suggests a large variability in the response rates for different types of questions, and particularly that participants have difficulty ascertaining information on other developer's activities. ConclusionThe findings provide insights for those interested in supporting the information needs of OS developer communities: They suggest that the tools and techniques developed in support of co-located developers should be largely mirrored for these communities: that they should be implementation centric, and directed at illustrating "how" the system achieves its functional goals and states. Likewise they should be directed at determining the reason for system bugs: a type of question frequently posed by OS developers but less frequently responded to.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirically-based characterization and quantification of information seeking through mailing lists during Open Source developers’ software evolution

Sharif

English

Alí

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

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“…software engineering activity, it is estimated that software engineers spend more than half of their time occupied with comprehension tasks (Wilde et al 2001;Zayour and Lethbridge 2001). If we take software maintenance not as a distinct phase but rather as an activity engaged in throughout the entire software lifecycle (Schneidewind et al 1999) then the software comprehension problem can be seen as permeating all aspects of a software system's existence from development through to maintenance and evolution.…”

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confidence: 99%

An empirical analysis of information retrieval based concept location techniques in software comprehension

et al. 2008

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Concept location, the problem of associating human oriented concepts with their counterpart solution domain concepts, is a fundamental problem that lies at the heart of software comprehension. Recent research has attempted to alleviate the impact of the concept location problem through the application of methods drawn from the information retrieval (IR) community. Here we present a new approach based on a complimentary IR method which also has a sound basis in cognitive theory. We compare our approach to related work through an experiment and present our conclusions. This research adapts and expands upon existing language modelling frameworks in IR for use in concept location, in software systems. In doing so it is novel in that it leverages implicit information available in system documentation. Surprisingly, empirical evaluation of this approach showed little performance benefit overall and several possible explanations are forwarded for this finding.

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“…The manner in which a programmer gets understanding of a software system varies greatly and depends on the individual, the magnitude of the program, the level of understanding needed, the kind of system, ... [18,29,8,23].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because of the human cognition process [29], program understanding can never be a fully automated process: the programmer should be free to explore the software, with the help of specialized tools [9,6]. These program exploration tools should identify those parts of the program that are likely to be interesting from a program understanding point of view [15,12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying Webmining Techniques to Execution Traces to Support the Program Comprehension Process

Zaidman

Calders

Demeyer

et al.

Ninth European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering

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Adoption of reverse engineering tools: a cognitive perspective and methodology

Cited by 11 publications

References 16 publications

An empirically-based characterization and quantification of information seeking through mailing lists during Open Source developers’ software evolution

An empirically-based characterization and quantification of information seeking through mailing lists during Open Source developers’ software evolution

An empirical analysis of information retrieval based concept location techniques in software comprehension

Applying Webmining Techniques to Execution Traces to Support the Program Comprehension Process

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