Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Software Evolution via Topic Modeling: An Analytic Stud

2015; Volume: 9; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14257/ijseia.2015.9.5.05

2208-9802

Shadi Banitaan, Mamdouh Alenezi,

Open Source Software Innovations

Open-source projects continue to evolve resulted in so many versions. Managing, visualizing and understanding an evolving software system are challenging tasks. In this work, we apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to discover source code topics and study their evolution over multiple software versions. We apply LDA to all versions of the system together and then determine how the assignment metric evolves over time. We study the software evolution of two large open-source projects, JEdit and JHotDraw, over twelve versions. The results show that changes in topics across versions are due to actual software changes such as adding, updating, and removing features. Our work suggests that using LDA can open many paths in software evolution research.