User Review-Based Change File Localization for Mobile Applications

In the current mobile app development, novel and emerging DevOps practices (e.g., Continuous Delivery, Integration, and user feedback analysis) and tools are becoming more widespread. For instance, the integration of user feedback (provided in the form of user reviews) in the software release cycle represents a valuable asset for the maintenance and evolution of mobile apps. To fully make use of these assets, it is highly desirable for developers to establish semantic links between the user reviews and the software artefacts to be changed (e.g., source code and documentation), and thus to localize the potential files to change for addressing the user feedback. In this paper, we propose RISING (Review Integration via claSsification, clusterIng, and linkiNG), an automated approach to support the continuous integration of user feedback via classification, clustering, and linking of user reviews. RISING leverages domain-specific constraint information and semi-supervised learning to group user reviews into multiple fine-grained clusters concerning similar users' requests. Then, by combining the textual information from both commit messages and source code, it automatically localizes potential change files to accommodate the users' requests. Our empirical studies demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline work in terms of clustering and localization accuracy, and thus produces more reliable results.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 8 table

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on FAMIX and MOOSE in Software Reengineering (FAMOOSr'09)

International audienceThe goal of the FAMOOSr workshop is to strengthen the community of researchers and practitioners who are working in re- and reverse engineering, by providing a forum for building future research using Moose and FAMIX as shared infrastructure. Research should be collaborative and supported by tools. The increasing amount of data available about software systems poses new challenges for reengineering research, as the proposed approaches need to scale. In this context, concerns about meta-modeling and analysis techniques need to be augmented by technical concerns about how to reuse and how to build upon the efforts of previous research. That is why Moose is an open-source software for researchers to build and share their analysis, meta-models, and data. Both FAMIX and Moose started in the context of FAMOOS, a European research project on object-oriented frameworks. Back in 1997 Moose was as a simple implementation of the FAMIX meta-model, which was a language independent meta-model for object-oriented systems. However over the past decade, Moose has been used in a growing number of research projects and has evolved to be a generic environment for various reverse and reengineering activities. In the same time, FAMIX was extended to support emerging research interest such as dynamic analysis, evolution analysis, identifier analysis, bug tracking analysis, or visualization. Recent work includes analysis of software architecture and semantic annotations. Currently, several research groups are using Moose as a platform, or FAMIX as a meta-model, and other groups announced interest in using them in the future

Discovering Loners and Phantoms in Commit and Issue Data

The interlinking of commit and issue data has become a de-facto standard in software development. Modern issue tracking systems, such as JIRA, automatically interlink commits and issues by the extraction of identifiers (e.g., issue key) from commit messages. However, the conventions for the use of interlinking methodologies vary between software projects. For example, some projects enforce the use of identifiers for every commit while others have less restrictive conventions. In this work, we introduce a model called PaLiMod to enable the analysis of interlinking characteristics in commit and issue data. We surveyed 15 Apache projects to investigate differences and commonalities between linked and non-linked commits and issues. Based on the gathered information, we created a set of heuristics to interlink the residual of non-linked commits and issues. We present the characteristics of Loners and Phantoms in commit and issue data. The results of our evaluation indicate that the proposed PaLiMod model and heuristics enable an automatic interlinking and can indeed reduce the residual of non-linked commits and issues in software projects

Networked learning environments

This chapter introduces the idea of networked learning environments and argues that these environments provide the totality of surrounding conditions for learning in digital networks. It provides illustrative vignettes of the ways that students appropriate networked environments for learning. The chapter then examines the notion of networked learning environments in relation to the idea of infrastructure and infrastructures for learning and sets out some issues arising from this perspective. The chapter suggests that students and teachers selectively constitute their own contexts and that design can only have an indirect effect on learning. The chapter goes on to argue that design needs to be located at the meso level of the institution and that a solution to the problem of indirect design lies in refocusing design at the meso level and on the design of infrastructures for learning

REmail - Integrating e-mail Communication in the Eclipse IDE

Během vývoje softwaru musí vývojáři mezi sebou komunikovat. Zvláště pokud pracují v distribuovaném prostředí. Například na open source projektech jsou nuceni využít různých asynchronních metod komunikace. Ze studií vyplývá, že ve srovnání s instatními zprávami, komentáři zdrojového kódu, či komentáři verzovacích systémů e-mail představuje zdaleka nejpoužívanější způsob komunikace při distribuovaném vývoji softwaru. Lze si proto představit, že archívy vývojářských e-mailů obsahují podstatné informace o nejrůznějších entitách zdrojového kódu. Časem však se takové informace ztrácejí, jelikož tyto e-maily je těžké dohledat. Proto jsme vyvinuli REmail, zásuvný modul pro Eclise, integrující e-mailovou komunikaci do IDE. Umožňuje vývojářům pracovat souběžně se zdrojovým kódem a e-maily, které jej diskutují, bez nutnosti opuštění IDE. Využitím relativně výpočetně nenáročných technik REmail dohledá všechny e-maily relevantní k vybrané entitě zdrojového kódu a umožní vývojáři s nimi pracovat.Developers of software systems have to communicate about the project they are building. Especially when working in a distributed development team, such as open source projects, developers must use an asynchronous means of communication. Studies tell us that e-mails are, by far, the means of communication mostly used during the distributed development, opposed to instant messaging, commit comments, or code comments. Therefore, we can imagine archives containing development e-mails enclose essential information concerning various entities of the source code. Unfortunately, such information gets lost with time, since relevant e-mails are hard to retrieve. We have developed REmail, an Eclipse plug-in, to integrate e-mail communication in the IDE. It allows developers to seamlessly handle source code entities and e-mails concerning the source code, without ever exiting from the IDE. Using lightweight linking techniques, REmail retrieves all the e-mails relevant to the chosen source code entities and makes them available to the developer.

Recovering from a Decade: A Systematic Mapping of Information Retrieval Approaches to Software Traceability

Engineers in large-scale software development have to manage large amounts of information, spread across many artifacts. Several researchers have proposed expressing retrieval of trace links among artifacts, i.e. trace recovery, as an Information Retrieval (IR) problem. The objective of this study is to produce a map of work on IR-based trace recovery, with a particular focus on previous evaluations and strength of evidence. We conducted a systematic mapping of IR-based trace recovery. Of the 79 publications classified, a majority applied algebraic IR models. While a set of studies on students indicate that IR-based trace recovery tools support certain work tasks, most previous studies do not go beyond reporting precision and recall of candidate trace links from evaluations using datasets containing less than 500 artifacts. Our review identified a need of industrial case studies. Furthermore, we conclude that the overall quality of reporting should be improved regarding both context and tool details, measures reported, and use of IR terminology. Finally, based on our empirical findings, we present suggestions on how to advance research on IR-based trace recovery

An Ecological Understanding of Evaluation Use: A Case Study of the Active for Life Evaluation

Analyzes uses of Active for Life program evaluations in multiple ecosystems -- program, community, field, and society -- including types of use such as symbolic or conceptual, sequential patterns, and leveraged use