The feature signatures of evolving programs

As programs evolve, their code increasingly becomes tangled by programmers and requirements. This mosaic quality complicated program comprehension and maintenance. Many of these activities can benefit from viewing the program as a collection of features. We introduce an inexpensive and easily compre...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Licata, Daniel R., Harris, Christopher D., Krishnamurthi, Shriram
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Application software
Batteries
Computer science
Control systems
Documentation
Humans
Programming profession
Social and professional topics
Social and professional topics > Professional topics
Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Management of computing and information systems
Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Management of computing and information systems > Software management
Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Management of computing and information systems > Software management > Software maintenance
Software and its engineering
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Software defect analysis
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Software defect analysis > Software testing and debugging
Software systems
Software tools
System testing
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Description
Summary:As programs evolve, their code increasingly becomes tangled by programmers and requirements. This mosaic quality complicated program comprehension and maintenance. Many of these activities can benefit from viewing the program as a collection of features. We introduce an inexpensive and easily comprehensible summary of program changes called the feature signature and investigate its properties. We find a remarkable similarity in the nature of feature signatures across multiple nontrivial programs, developers and magnitude changes. This indicates that feature signatures are a meaningful notion worth studying. We then show numerous applications of feature signatures to software evolution, establishing their utility.
ISSN:1938-4300
2643-1572
DOI:10.1109/ASE.2003.1240321