Intelligent search techniques for large software systems.

There are many tools available today to help software engineers search in source code systems. It is often the case, however, that there is a gap between what people really want to find and the actual query strings they specify. This is because a concept in a software system may be represented by many different terms, while the same term may have different meanings in different places. Therefore, software engineers often have to guess as they specify a search, and often have to repeatedly search before finding what they want. To alleviate the search problem, this thesis describes a study of what we call intelligent search techniques as implemented in a software exploration environment, whose purpose is to facilitate software maintenance. We propose to utilize some information retrieval techniques to automatically apply transformations to the query strings. The thesis first introduces the intelligent search techniques used in our study, including abbreviation concatenation and abbreviation expansion. Then it describes in detail the rating algorithms used to evaluate the query results' similarity to the original query strings. Next, we describe a series of experiments we conducted to assess the effectiveness of both the intelligent search methods and our rating algorithms. Finally, we describe how we use the analysis of the experimental results to recommend an effective combination of searching techniques for software maintenance, as well as to guide our future research