Reverse Engineering Co-maintenance Relationships Using Conceptual Analysis of Source Code

Abstract

In this work, we explore the relationship between topic models and co-maintenance history by introducing a visualization that compares conceptual cohesion within change lists. We explain how this view of the project history can give insight about the semantic architecture of the code, and we identify a number of patterns that characterize particular kinds of maintenance tasks. We examine the relationship between co-maintenance history and concept location, and visualize the distribution of changes across concepts to show how these techniques can be used to predict co-maintenance of source code methods.