An Empirical Study of the Concept Assignment Problem
Martin P. Robillard, David C. Shepherd, Emily Hill, Lori Pollock · 2007
Concept assignment involves identifying the parts of the source code associated with the implementation of a high-level concept, such as a functional requirement. Although concept assignment is at the root of a number of software engineering activities (e.g., reverse engineering, requirement traceability), we know relatively little about the characteristics of the code that different developers map to a concept. For example, for a given concept, how much do the mappings produced by different developers vary? We designed and conducted an empirical study of concept assignment. Our study resulted in the collection of three distinct mappings for 16 different concepts (for a total of 48 mappings), and produced by 23 distinct subjects. This report describes our experimental procedure and the data we collected. 1.