The investigation of a software system prior to a modification task often constitutes an important fraction of the overall effort associated with the task. We present Suade, an Eclipse plug-in to automatically generate suggestions for software investigation. The goal of Suade is to increase the efficiency with which developers explore the source code by recommending locations that are likely to be relevant to the task. Based on a context of software elements (fields and methods) explicitly specified by a developer, Suade automatically generates other elements that are likely to be relevant given the context, by analyzing the topology of structural dependencies in a software system.

As part of the evolution of software systems, effort is often invested to discover in what parts of the source code a feature (or other concern) is implemented. Unfortunately, knowledge about a concern's implementation can become invalid as the system evolves. We propose to mitigate this problem by automatically inferring structural patterns among the elements identified as relevant to a concern's implementation. We then document the inferred patterns as rules that can be checked as the source code evolves. Checking whether structural patterns hold across different versions of a system enables the automatic identification of new elements related to a documented concern. We implemented our technique for JAVA in an Eclipse plug-in called ISIS and applied it to a number of concerns. With a case study spanning 34 versions of the development history of an open-source system, we show how our approach supports the tracking of a concern's implementation through modifications such as extensions and refactorings