Investigating the Effect of Partial and Real-Time Feedback in INMAP Code-To-Architecture Mapping
Zipani Tom Sinkala, Sebastian Herold · Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems · 2023
InMap is an interactive and iterative information retrieval-based automated mapping algorithm that produces code-to-architecture mapping recommendations.In its original form, InMap requires an architect to provide feedback for each code-to-architecture mapping recommendation in a given set produced (complete feedback).However, architects may delay/ defer deciding on some of the mapping recommendations provided.This leads us to ask, how would InMap perform if only a subset of the recommendations provided (partial feedback) or only a single recommendation (real-time feedback) is reviewed by the architect?Through carefully designed mapping experiments, we show that an architect giving partial or real-time feedback does not harm the recall and precision of the recommendations produced by InMap.On the contrary, we observed from the results of the systems tested a net increase of 2-5% (depending on the approach).This shows that in addition to In-Map's original complete feedback approach, the two new approaches of collecting feedback presented in this paper, i.e. partial and real-time, create flexibility in how software architecture consistency checking tool developers may choose to collect mapping feedback and how architects may opt-to provide feedback, with no harm to the recall and precision of the results.