An empirical study of the relationship between the concepts expressed in source code and dependence |
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Authors: | David Binkley [Author Vitae]Author Vitae] Mark Harman [Author Vitae] [Author Vitae] Kiarash Mahdavi [Author Vitae] |
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Affiliation: | King’s College London, CREST Centre, Department of Computer Science, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom |
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Abstract: | Programs express domain-level concepts in their source code. It might be expected that such concepts would have a degree of semantic cohesion. This cohesion ought to manifest itself in the dependence between statements all of which contribute to the computation of the same concept. This paper addresses a set of research questions that capture this informal observation. It presents the results of experiments on 10 programs that explore the relationship between domain-level concepts and dependence in source code. The results show that code associated with concepts has a greater degree of coherence, with tighter dependence. This finding has positive implications for the analysis of concepts as it provides an approach to decompose a program into smaller executable units, each of which captures the behaviour of the program with respect to a domain-level concept. |
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Keywords: | Program slicing Concept assignment Software engineering Program comprehension |
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