Static Techniques for Concept Location in Object-Oriented Code

Concept location in source code is the process that identifies where a software system implements a specific concept. While it is well accepted that concept location is essential for the maintenance of complex procedural code like code written in C, it is much less obvious whether it is also needed for the maintenance of the object-oriented code. After all, the object-oriented code is structured into classes and well-designed classes already implement concepts, so the issue seems to be reduced to the selection of the appropriate class. The objective of our work is to see if the techniques for concept location are still needed (they are) and whether object-oriented structuring facilitates concept location (it does not). This paper focuses on static concept location techniques that share common prerequisites and are search the source code using regular expression matching, or static program dependencies, or information retrieval. The paper analyses these techniques to see how they compare to each other in terms of their respective strengths and weaknesses.