Query expansion using novel use case scenario relationship for finding feature location

Abstract

Feature location is a technique for determining source code that implements specific features in software. It developed to help minimize effort on program comprehension. The main challenge of feature location research is how to bridge the gap between abstract keywords in use cases and detail in source code. The use case scenarios are software requirements artifacts that state the input, logic, rules, actor, and output of a function in the software. The sentence on use case scenario is sometimes described another sentence in other use case scenario. This study contributes to creating expansion queries in feature locations by finding the relationship between use case scenarios. The relationships include inner association, outer association and intratoken association. The research employs latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to create model topics on source code. Query expansion using inner, outer and intratoken was tested for finding feature locations on a Java-based open-source project. The best precision rate was 50%. The best recall was 100%, which was found in several use case scenarios implemented in a few files. The best average precision rate was 16.7%, which was found in inner association experiments. The best average recall rate was 68.3%, which was found in all compound association experiments.