Supporting Program Comprehension Using Semantic and Structural Information

Jonathan I. Maletic, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science,
The University of Memphis
CS Faculty Candidate

February 23, 2001
11 a.m.
Fuller Labs 320

Abstract

The talk will focus on the combined use of semantic and structural information of programs to support the comprehension tasks involved in the maintenance and reengineering of software systems. Here, semantic refers to the domain specific issues (both problem and development domains) of a software system. The other dimension, structural, refers to issues such as the actual syntactic structure of the program along with the control and data flow that it represents. An advanced information retrieval method, latent semantic indexing, is used to define a semantic similarity measure between software components. Components within a software system can then be clustered together using this similarity measure. Simple structural information (i.e., file organization) of the software system is then used to assess the semantic cohesion of the clusters and of the files, with respect to each other. These measures are formally defined for general application. A set of experiments is presented to demonstrate how these measures can assist in the understanding of a nontrivial software system, namely a version of Mosaic.

Host

Professor Micha Hofri

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