Locating Concepts on Use Case Steps in Source Code

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Published by the IEICE: IEICE Transactions Online.

Abstract

Use case descriptions describe features consisting of multiple concepts with following a procedural flow. Because existing feature location techniques lack a relation between concepts in such features, it is difficult to identify the concepts in the source code with high accuracy. This paper presents a technique to locate concepts in a feature described in a use case description consisting of multiple use case steps using dependency between them. We regard each use case step as a description of a concept and apply an existing concept location technique to the descriptions of concepts and obtain lists of modules. Also, three types of dependencies: time, call, and data dependencies among use case steps are extracted based on their textual description. Modules in the obtained lists failing to match the dependency between concepts are filtered out. Thus, we can obtain more precise lists of modules. We have applied our technique to use case descriptions in a benchmark. Results show that our technique outperformed baseline setting without applying the filtering.

Related papers

This work builds on

• International Workshop Locating Procedural Steps in Source Code QUORS 2023

BibTeX

@article{hayashi-ieicet202405,
    author = {Shinpei Hayashi and Teppei Kato and Motoshi Saeki},
    title = {Locating Concepts on Use Case Steps in Source Code},
    journal = {IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems},
    volume = {107-D},
    number = 5,
    pages = {602--612},
    doi = {10.1587/transinf.2023KBP0004},
    year = 2024,
}