1,721,175 research outputs found
Source Code Survival with the Kaplan Meier Estimator
No full textThe presence of dead code may affect the comprehensibility, the readability, and the size of source code so increasing the effort and the cost for maintenance. The elimination
of dead code needs a huge cost and effort for recognizing and
eliminating code that is not effectively used. The goal of this
work consists in defining an approach based on the Kaplan Meier
estimator to analyze dead code. The validity of the approach has
been preliminarily assessed on a case study constituted of fiftyeight versions of five open source software systems implemented
in Java. The results suggested that two out of the five systems
where implemented avoiding as much as possible the introduction
of dead code
Assessing communication media richness in requirements negotiation
No full textA critical claim in software requirements negotiation regards the assertion that group performances
improve when a medium with different richness level is used. Accordingly, the authors have conducted a
study to compare traditional face-to-face communication, the richest medium and two less rich
communication media, namely a distributed three-dimensional virtual environment and a text-based
structured chat. This comparison has been performed with respect to the time needed to accomplish a
negotiation. Furthermore, as the only assessment of the time could not be meaningful, the authors have also
analysed the media effect on the issues arisen in the negotiation process and the quality of the negotiated
software requirements
Coherence of comments and method implementations: a dataset and an empirical investigation
No full textIn this paper, we present the results of a manual assessment on the coherence between the comments and the implementation of 3636 methods in three open source soft- ware applications (for one of these applications, we considered two different subsequent versions) implemented in Java. The results of this assessment have been collected in a dataset we made publicly available on the Web. The creation of this dataset is based on a protocol that is detailed in this paper. We present that protocol to let researchers evaluate the goodness of our dataset and to ease its future possible extensions. Another contribution of this paper consists in preliminarily investigating on the effectiveness of adopting a Vec- tor Space Model (VSM) with the tf-idf schema to discriminate coherent and non-coherent methods. We observed that the lexical similarity alone is not sufficient for this distinc- tion, while encouraging results have been obtained by applying an Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier on the whole vector space
Identifying Similar Pages in Web Applications using a Competitive Clustering Algorithm
Full text linkWe present an approach based on Winner Takes All (WTA), a competitive clustering algorithm, to support the comprehension of static and dynamic Web applications during Web application reengineering. This approach adopts a process that first computes the distance between Web pages and then identifies and groups similar pages using the considered clustering algorithm. We present an instance of application of the clustering process to identify similar pages at the structural level. The page structure is encoded into a string of HTML tags and then the distance between Web pages at the structural level is computed using the Levenshtein string edit distance algorithm. A prototype to automate the clustering process has been implemented that can be extended to other instances of the process, such as the identification of groups of similar pages at content level. The approach and the tool have been evaluated in two case studies. The results have shown that the WTA clustering algorithm suggests heuristics to easily identify the best partition of Web pages into clusters among the possible partitions
An Approach and an Eclipse Based Environment for Enhancing the Navigation Structure of Web Sites
Full text linkThis paper presents an approach based on information retrieval and clustering techniques for automatically enhancing the navigation structure of a Web site for improving navigability. The approach increments the set of navigation links provided in each page of the site with a semantic navigation map, i.e., a set of links enabling navigating from a given page to other pages of the site showing similar or related content. The approach uses Latent Semantic Indexing to compute a dissimilarity measure between the pages of the site and a graph-theoretic clustering algorithm to group pages showing similar or related content according to the calculated dissimilarity measure. AJAX code is finally used to extend each Web page with an associated semantic navigation map. The paper also presents a prototype of a tool developed to support the approach and the results from a case study conducted to assess the validity and feasibility of the proposal
A Text Retrieval Approach to Recover Links among E-Mails and Source Code Classes
No full textDuring software development and evolution, the com- munication among stakeholders is one of the most important activities. Stakeholders communicate to discuss various topics, ranging from low-level concerns (e.g., refactoring) to high-level resolutions (e.g., design rationale). To support such a commu- nication, e-mails are widely used in both commercial and open source software projects. Although several approaches have been proposed to recover links among software artifacts, very few are concerned with e-mails. Recovering links between e-mails and software artifacts discussed in these e-mails is a non trivial task. The main issue is related to the nature of the communication that is scarcely structured and mostly informal. Many of the proposed approaches are based on text search or text retrieval and reformulate the link recovery as a document retrieval problem. We refine and improve such solutions by leveraging the parts of which an e-mail is composed of: header, current message, and previous messages. The relevance of these parts is weighted by a probabilistic approach based on text retrieval. The results of an empirical study conducted on a public benchmark indicate that the new approach in many cases outperforms the baselines: text retrieval and lightweight text search approaches
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