An empirical study of the relationship between the concepts expressed in source code and dependence

David Binkley; Nicolas Gold; Mark Harman; Zheng Li; Kiarash Mahdavi

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2008.04.007

An empirical study of the relationship between the concepts expressed in source code and dependence

David Binkley, Nicolas Gold, Mark Harman, Zheng Li, Kiarash Mahdavi

Informatics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Conference paper

11 Citations (Scopus)

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. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	2287 - 2298
Number of pages	12
Journal	Journal of Systems and Software
Volume	81
Issue number	12
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2008.04.007
Publication status	Published - Dec 2008
Event	Australian Software Engineering Conference - Melbourne, Australia Duration: 10 Apr 2007 → 13 Apr 2007

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title = "An empirical study of the relationship between the concepts expressed in source code and dependence",

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. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.",

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AU - Binkley, David

AU - Gold, Nicolas

AU - Harman, Mark

AU - Li, Zheng

AU - Mahdavi, Kiarash

PY - 2008/12

Y1 - 2008/12

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AB - 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. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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DO - 10.1016/j.jss.2008.04.007

M3 - Conference paper

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JF - Journal of Systems and Software

IS - 12

T2 - Australian Software Engineering Conference

Y2 - 10 April 2007 through 13 April 2007

ER -

An empirical study of the relationship between the concepts expressed in source code and dependence

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