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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title Automatic search term identification for change tasks
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Katja Kevic
  • Thomas Fritz
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
ISBN 978-1-4503-2768-8
Event Title 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER)
Event Type conference
Event Location Hyderabad
Event Start Date May 31 - 2014
Event End Date June 7 - 2014
Place of Publication Hyderabad, India
Publisher IEEE
Abstract Text At the beginning of a change task, software developers search the source code to locate the places relevant to the task. As previous research and a small exploratory study that we conducted show, developers perform poorly in identifying good search terms and therefore waste a lot of time querying and exploring irrelevant code. To support developers in this step, we present an approach to automatically identify good search terms. Based on existing work and an analysis of change tasks, we derived heuristics, determined their relevancy and used the results to develop our approach. For a preliminary evaluation, we conducted a study with ten developers working on open source change tasks. Our approach was able to identify good search terms for all tasks and outperformed the searches of the participants, illustrating the potential of our approach. In addition, since the used heuristics are solely based on textual features of change tasks, our approach is easy and generally applicable and can leverage much of the existing work on feature location.
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1145/2591062.2591117
Other Identification Number merlin-id:9299
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