Authors

Abstract

Feature location is a program comprehension activity in which a developer inspects source code to locate the classes or methods that implement a feature of interest. Many feature location techniques (FLTs) are based on text retrieval models, and in such FLTs it is typical for the models to be trained on source code snapshots. However, source code evolution leads to model obsolescence and thus to the need to retrain the model from the latest snapshot. In this paper, we introduce a topic-modeling-based FLT in which the model is built incrementally from source code history. By training an online learning algorithm using changesets, the FLT maintains an up-to-date model without incurring the non-trivial computational cost associated with retraining traditional FLTs. Overall, we studied over 1,200 defects and features from 14 open-source Java projects. We also present a historical simulation that demonstrates how the FLT performs as a project evolves. Our results indicate that the accuracy of a changeset-based FLT is similar to that of a snapshot-based FLT, but without the retraining costs.

Description

Hello!

Most things related to this project can be found in the GitHub repository.

Some files which you might find of immediate interest:

We include all of these sources (even the embarrassing commit history) to help encourage others in software engineering to engage in open science principles. If there is anything you’d like to see included, feel free to email at cscorley@crimson.ua.edu.

Dataset

Our dataset is available as part of the GitHub repository (and release archive), but things such as the corpora go through extraction and pre-processing steps.

All project information is in projects.csv, and supplementary data is under the data/ directory.

data/ layout

Each subdirectory of data/ follows the following schema:

  • <project>/ – the main project name (from projects.csv)
    • repos.txt – the repository URLs for cloning
    • svn2git.csv – if the repository was converted to git from subversion, this is the SVN revision -> Git sha mapping
    • <version>/ – version specific files:
      • ids.txt – line separated query ids that relate to the issue report ids or feature request ids used in the datasets.
      • queries/ – contains the unpreprocessed queries:
        • ShortDescription<id>.txt – the title or summary of the query
        • LongDescription<id>.txt – the full description of the query
      • goldsets/ – contains the goldset files:
        • class/ – contains class-level goldsets
          • <id>.txt – line separated class names related to the query id
        • method/ – contains method-level goldsets
          • <id>.txt – line separated method names related to the query id
      • <FLT>_<topic modeler>-<level>-ranks.csv – the effectiveness measures for each of the various experiment setups, e.g., changeset_lda-class-ranks.csv is the ranks of the batch-mode LDA experiment at the class-level.

There may be other files in the directories which originate from the two original datasets.

Code

We’ve done our best to include every possible bit of code written in order to complete this paper. Much of the main experiment is under src/, with a couple of corresponding tests in tests/, and some helper scripts in scripts that helped to convert a dataset to our format or generate tables for the paper.

Installing

Install everything using make:

$ make install

Or, if you use virtualenv, you can make init instead.

Now, you should be able to run commands:

$ cfl <project name>

e.g.,

$ cfl mucommander

This will run the experiment on the given project name.

To run the experiment on a certain version or level, use the --version and --level flags.

$ cfl  mucommander --version v0.8.5 --level class

See --help for additional usage.

$ cfl --help
Usage: cfl [OPTIONS] NAME

Changesets for Feature Location

Options:
--verbose
--debug
--path TEXT     Set the directory to work within
--version TEXT  Version of project to run experiment on
--level TEXT    Granularity level of project to run experiment on
--help          Show this message and exit.