Conclave: ontology-driven measurement of semantic relatedness between source code elements and problem domain concepts

Software maintainers are often challenged with source code changes to improve software systems, or eliminate defects, in unfamiliar programs. To undertake these tasks a sufficient understanding of the system (or at least a small part of it) is required. One of the most time consuming tasks of this process is locating which parts of the code are responsible for some key functionality or feature. Feature (or concept) location techniques address this problem. This paper introduces Conclave, an environment for software analysis, and in particular the Conclave-Mapper tool that provides a feature location facility. This tool explores natural language terms used in programs (e.g. function and variable names), and using textual analysis and a collection of Natural Language Processing techniques, computes synonymous sets of terms. These sets are used to score relatedness between program elements, and search queries or problem domain concepts, producing sorted ranks of program elements that address the search criteria, or concepts. An empirical study is also discussed to evaluate the underlying feature location technique.