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Dynamic Evolution of Source Code Topics

Authors:
Khaled Almustafa
Mamdouh Alenezi

Keywords: Open source; Source code; LDA; Topic Extraction; Software Evolution.

Abstract:
Open-source projects continue to evolve that result in so many versions. Analyzing the unstructured information in the source code is based on the idea that the unstructured information reveals, to some extent, the concepts of the problem domain of the software. This information adds a new layer of source code semantic information and captures the domain semantics of the software. Developers shift their focus on which topic they work more in each version. Topic models reveal topics from the corpus, which embody real world concepts by analyzing words that frequently co-occur. These topics have been found to be effective mechanisms for describing the major themes spanning a corpus. Previous Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) based topic analysis tools can capture strengths evolution of various development topics over time or the content evolution of existing topics over time. Regrettably, none of the existing techniques can capture both strength and content evolution. In this work, we apply Dynamic Topic Models (DTM) to analyze the source code over a period of 10 different versions to capture both strength and content evolution simultaneously. We evaluate our approach by conducting a case study on a well-known open source software system, jEdit. The results show that our approach could capture not only how the strengths of various development topics change over time, but also how the content of each topic (i.e., words that form the topic) changes over time which shows that our approach can provide a more complete and valuable view of software evolution.

Pages: 307 to 312

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: November 15, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-438-1

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from November 15, 2015 to November 20, 2015