Locating the Meaning of Terms in Source Code Research on "Term Introduction"

Abstract

Software developers are often facing the challenge of understanding a large code base. Program comprehension is not only achieved by looking at object interactions, but also by considering the meaning of the identifiers and the contained terms. Ideally, the source code should exemplify this meaning. We propose to call the source code locations that define the meaning of a term term introduction. We further derive a heuristic to determine the introduction location with the help of an explorative study. This study was performed on 8000 manually evaluated samples gained from 30 open source projects. To support reproducibility, all samples and classifications are also available online. The achieved results show a precision of 75% for the heuristic.