Recent studies indicated that showing the similarity between the source code being developed and related high-level artifacts (HLAs), such as requirements, helps developers improve the quality of source code identifiers. In this paper, we present CodeTopics, an Eclipse plug-in that in addition to showing the similarity between source code and HLAs also highlights to what extent the code under development covers topics described in HLAs. Such views complement information derived by showing only the similarity between source code and HLAs helping (i) developers to identify functionality that are not implemented yet or (ii) newcomers to comprehend source code artifacts by showing them the topics that these artifacts relate to.

Feature location is the process of finding the source code that implements a functional requirement of a software system. It plays an important role in software maintenance activities, but when it is performed manually, it can be challenging and time-consuming, especially for large, long-lived systems. This paper describes a tool called FLAT3 that integrates textual and dynamic feature location techniques along with feature annotation capabilities and a useful visualization technique, providing a complete suite of tools that allows developers to quickly and easily locate the code that implements a feature and then save these annotations for future use.

Acquiring general understanding of large software systems and components from which they are built can be a time consuming task, but having such an understanding is an important prerequisite to adding features or fixing bugs. In this paper we propose the tool, namely TopicXP, to support developers during such software maintenance tasks by extracting and analyzing unstructured information in source code identifier names and comments using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. TopicXPenables developers to gain an overview of a software system under analysis by extracting and visualizing natural language topics, which generally correspond to concepts or features implemented in software classes. TopicXPis implemented as an open-source Eclipse plug-in, which proposes interactive visualization of topics along with structural dependencies between underlying classes implementing these topics. The paper also presents the results of a preliminary user study aimed at evaluating TopicXP.