A Weighted Call Graph Approach for Finding Relevant Components in Source Code

Abstract

To reuse open source code it is necessary to understand how the software is implemented and how the software architecture is designed. However, it is not an easy task because open source typically does not have the design document which maps features to source code components. In this paper, we propose a method to find the components relevant to a feature in open source code. Our solution is a static approach to recover the relationship between the software manual and the source code and it is based on information retrieval technique. In our approach, we build and analyze a weighted call graph using the similarity values obtained from the vector space information retrieval. Experimental application shows that our method is more robust and is less influenced by cut level than the method of Zhao et al.[3].