Feature Location Method Based on Call Chain Analysis
Fu Ku · 2014
In order to accomplish a variety of software maintenance tasks,such as fixing bugs,changing existent functionalities,or adding new features,developers often need to look for related codes of a feature in advance.Such a process to identify relevant program elements according to a given feature is called as feature location.Existing feature localization methods,mainly based on user demand,search related code elements in the source code,and recommend them to the user.However,these scattered elements do not have any connection with each other,and user may still need to manually find out the relationship between the elements,to understand how the code elements combine together to achieve a specific function.However,a new approach based on method-call-chains associated with data transferring can improve the feature location practice.This method can analyze the source code,extract all of the method-call-chains associated with the data transferring,and find relevant ones on the user's demand.This method-call-chain is not a simple code segment.It can reveal the implementation of specific functions,and help user to understand the program better.An Eclipse plugin of this approach was evaluated on JEdit.And the precision of the results of the tool is average 55%.