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Using information retrieval based coupling measures for impact analysis

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Abstract

Coupling is an important property of software systems, which directly impacts program comprehension. In addition, the strength of coupling measured between modules in software is often used as a predictor of external software quality attributes such as changeability, ripple effects of changes and fault-proneness. This paper presents a new set of coupling measures for Object-Oriented (OO) software systems measuring conceptual coupling of classes. Conceptual coupling is based on measuring the degree to which the identifiers and comments from different classes relate to each other. This type of relationship, called conceptual coupling, is measured through the use of Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. The proposed measures are different from existing coupling measures and they capture new dimensions of coupling, which are not captured by the existing coupling measures. The paper investigates the use of the conceptual coupling measures during change impact analysis. The paper reports the findings of a case study in the source code of the Mozilla web browser, where the conceptual coupling metrics were compared to nine existing structural coupling metrics and proved to be better predictors for classes impacted by changes.

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Notes

  1. Mozilla is a web browser and is available at http://www.mozilla.org/ (verified 27/06/08)

  2. WinMerge is a visual text file differencing and merging tool for Windows and can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/winmerge (verified at 27/06/08)

  3. TortoiseCVS is a concurrent versions system (CVS) tool for Windows and can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tortoisecvs(verified at 27/06/08)

  4. The bug can be accessed in Bugzilla at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=232570 (verified at 27/06/08)

  5. Bugzilla is a web-based general-purpose bug-tracking tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License. Bugzilla can be fount at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ (verified at 27/06/08)

  6. The bug can be accessed in Bugzilla at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=226439 (verified at 27/06/08)

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation (CCF-0438970 and CCF-0820133), by the Hungarian national grants GVOP-3.3.1.-2004-04-0024/3.0 and GVOP-3.1.1.-2004-05-0345/3.0 and by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their pertinent and helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, 23185, USA

    Denys Poshyvanyk

  2. Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 48202, USA

    Andrian Marcus

  3. Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary

    Rudolf Ferenc & Tibor Gyimóthy

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  1. Denys Poshyvanyk
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  2. Andrian Marcus
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  4. Tibor Gyimóthy
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Correspondence to Andrian Marcus.

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Guest Editors: Tim Menzies and Letha Etzkorn

Denys Poshyvanyk performed this work while at Wayne State University.

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Poshyvanyk, D., Marcus, A., Ferenc, R. et al. Using information retrieval based coupling measures for impact analysis. Empir Software Eng 14, 5–32 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-008-9088-2

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