Software system documentation is almost always expressed informally in natural language and free text. Examples include requirement specifications, design documents, manual pages, system development journals, error logs, and related maintenance reports. In our 2002 seminal paper we proposed a method based on information retrieval to recover traceability links between source code and free text documents. A premise of our work was that programmers use meaningful names for program items, such as functions, variables, types, classes, and methods. The paper paved the way to the adoption of IR in software engineering opening a new perspective. Reflecting on the past twenty years we briefly overview the many results that have been achieved, however, the emergence of new technologies, such as AI, pose unprecedented challenges.

Software system documentation is almost always expressed informally in natural language and free text. Examples include requirement specifications, design documents, manual pages, system development journals, error logs, and related maintenance reports. We propose a method based on information retrieval to recover traceability links between source code and free text documents. A premise of our work is that programmers use meaningful names for program items, such as functions, variables, types, classes, and methods. We believe that the application-domain knowledge that programmers process when writing the code is often captured by the mnemonics for identifiers; therefore, the analysis of these mnemonics can help to associate high-level concepts with program concepts and vice-versa. We apply both a probabilistic and a vector space information retrieval model in two case studies to trace C++ source code onto manual pages and Java code to functional requirements. We compare the results of applying the two models, discuss the benefits and limitations, and describe directions for improvements.

The Internet and WEB pervasivenesses are changing the landscape of several different areas, ranging from information gathering/managing and commerce to software development, maintenance and evolution. Software companies having a geographically distributed structure, or geographically distributed customers, are adopting information communication technologies to cooperate. Communication technologies and infrastructures allow the companies to create a virtual software factory. This paper proposes to adopt queue theory to deal with an economically relevant category of problems: the staffing, the process management and the service level evaluation of massive maintenance projects in a virtual software factory. Data from a massive corrective maintenance intervention were used to simulate and study different service center configurations, in particular, a monolithic configuration and a configuration corresponding to a multi-phase maintenance process where several maintenance centers cooperated. Queue theory allowed effective control of the process supporting project management decisions. The mathematical tool provided a means to assess staffing, evaluate service level and balance the workload between maintenance centers while executing the project.

The actual effort to evolve and maintain a software system is likely to vary depending on the amount of clones (i.e., duplicated or slightly different code fragments) present in the system. This paper presents a method for monitoring and predicting clones evolution across subsequent versions of a software system. Clones are firstly identified using a metric-based approach, then they are modeled in terms of time series identifying a predictive model. The proposed method has been validated with an experimental activity performed on 27 subsequent versions of mSQL, a medium-size software system written in C. The time span period of the analyzed mSQL releases covers four years, from May 1995 (mSQL 1.0.6) to May 1999 (mSQL 2. 0. 10). For any given software release, the identified models was able to predict the clone percentage of the subsequent release with an average error below 4 %. A higher prediction error was observed only in correspondence of major system redesign.

Abstract This paper presents a method to build and maintain traceability links and properties of a set of object‐oriented software releases. The method recovers an ‘as is’ design from C++ software releases, compares recovered designs at the class interface level, and helps the user to deal with inconsistencies by pointing out regions of code where differences are concentrated. The comparison step exploits edit distance and a maximum match algorithm. The method has been experimented with on two freely available C++ systems. Results as well as examples of applications to the visualization of the traceability information and to the estimation of the size of changes during maintenance are reported in the paper. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The research described in the paper is concerned with the application of information retrieval to software maintenance, and in particular to the problem of recovering traceability links between the source code of a system and its free text documentation. We introduce a method based on the general idea of vector space information retrieval and apply it in two case studies to trace C++ source code onto manual pages and Java code onto functional requirements. The case studies discussed in the paper replicate the studies presented by G. Antoniol et al. (1999; 2000), respectively where a probabilistic information retrieval model was applied. We compare the results of vector space and probabilistic models and formulate hypotheses to explain the differences.

Software evolution in a cooperative environment, where a pool of maintainers/developers contribute to the overall system changes, is challenging due to several factors, such as the poor communication among individuals and the high number of produced changes. Conflicting or contradictory changes, unforeseen or unexpected dependencies may result in a non working system. We propose a strategy aimed to reduce the risk of conflicting changes in a maintenance cooperative environment. To evaluate the feasibility of our approach and to attempt to estimate the size of the code to be scrutinised per single changed line, we developed a number of tools and tested our approach on release 30 of DDD software system. The preliminary results are encouraging. Potentially impacted LOCS per single changed LOC is on the average less than 4.

This paper describes Cooperative Maintenance Conceptual Model ( CM 2 ), a conceptual model aimed at supporting software maintenance in a collaborative fashion. The main goal of CM 2 is to support the software maintenance process through the acquisition, structuring and distribution of the information concerned with the maintenance process itself. Information is structured as a network of linked comments and concerns both the analysis and design activities (Rationale in the Large) and the implementation of a change (Rationale in the Small). We also present COMANCHE (COoperative MAintenance Network Centered Hypertextual Enviroment), an enviroment which reflects the CM 2 ideas and principles.