1,024 research outputs found
Applications of Multi-view Learning Approaches for Software Comprehension
Program comprehension concerns the ability of an individual to make an
understanding of an existing software system to extend or transform it.
Software systems comprise of data that are noisy and missing, which makes
program understanding even more difficult. A software system consists of
various views including the module dependency graph, execution logs,
evolutionary information and the vocabulary used in the source code, that
collectively defines the software system. Each of these views contain unique
and complementary information; together which can more accurately describe the
data. In this paper, we investigate various techniques for combining different
sources of information to improve the performance of a program comprehension
task. We employ state-of-the-art techniques from learning to 1) find a suitable
similarity function for each view, and 2) compare different multi-view learning
techniques to decompose a software system into high-level units and give
component-level recommendations for refactoring of the system, as well as
cross-view source code search. The experiments conducted on 10 relatively large
Java software systems show that by fusing knowledge from different views, we
can guarantee a lower bound on the quality of the modularization and even
improve upon it. We proceed by integrating different sources of information to
give a set of high-level recommendations as to how to refactor the software
system. Furthermore, we demonstrate how learning a joint subspace allows for
performing cross-modal retrieval across views, yielding results that are more
aligned with what the user intends by the query. The multi-view approaches
outlined in this paper can be employed for addressing problems in software
engineering that can be encoded in terms of a learning problem, such as
software bug prediction and feature location
- …