Assisted Software Exploration using Formal Concept Analysis

Paul Heckmann, Daniel Speicher

2012

Abstract

Program comprehension requires understanding the structures within the program. Some of these structures are created intentionally and well known (design pattern), others arise implicitly but are still meaningful, and finally some structures emerge accidentally without any meaning. We build on a previously suggested approach to mine structures in software using Formal Concept Analysis. In contrast to previous work, we found the performance of our tool to be still acceptable for projects of interesting size (600 classes). A prominence index for classes based on the formal concepts proved to be helpful for the identification of core structures (high prominence) as well for focusing on specific structures (low prominence). We report about two experiments. In the first the tool guided the experimenter to central structures of JUnit as documented before but unknown by the experimenter. In the second the tool led us to the core structures of our own software.

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Heckmann P. and Speicher D. (2012). Assisted Software Exploration using Formal Concept Analysis . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Software Knowledge - Volume 1: SKY, (IC3K 2012) ISBN 978-989-8565-32-7, pages 11-21. DOI: 10.5220/0004175400110021


in Bibtex Style

@conference{sky12,
author={Paul Heckmann and Daniel Speicher},
title={Assisted Software Exploration using Formal Concept Analysis},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Software Knowledge - Volume 1: SKY, (IC3K 2012)},
year={2012},
pages={11-21},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004175400110021},
isbn={978-989-8565-32-7},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Software Knowledge - Volume 1: SKY, (IC3K 2012)
TI - Assisted Software Exploration using Formal Concept Analysis
SN - 978-989-8565-32-7
AU - Heckmann P.
AU - Speicher D.
PY - 2012
SP - 11
EP - 21
DO - 10.5220/0004175400110021