Information Retrieval Applications in Software Maintenance and Evolution

There is a growing interest in creating tools that can assist engineers in all phases of the software life cycle. This assistance requires techniques that go beyond traditional static and dynamic analysis. An example of such a technique applies information retrieval (IR), which exploits information found in a project’s natural language. Such information can be extracted from the source code’s identifiers and comments and in artifacts associated with the project, such as the requirements. The techniques described pertain to the maintenance and evolution phase of the software life cycle and focus on such problems as feature location and impact analysis. These techniques highlight the bright future that IR brings to addressing software engineering problems.

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