III: Small: Collaborative Research: An Inductive Framework to Support Software Maintenance

软件维护和发展是软件生命周期中至关重要且消耗资源的阶段。在长期、大规模和全球分布式系统的情况下，引入软件更改是一个特别复杂的现象。多年的研究工作已经认识到在软件维护期间支持开发人员的三个核心任务：特性定位（源代码变更的起点）、影响分析（其他也容易发生变更的软件实体）和专家开发人员建议（实现变更的合适开发人员）。该研究将通过集成和挖掘在软件系统发展过程中产生和不断变化的结构化和非结构化软件工件中杂乱的潜在信息，为这些任务开发一种新的一站式解决方案，这些信息在当前解决方案中很大程度上未被开发。该研究计划有三个主要目标：1)定义一个新的集成框架SE2，用于在单一保护伞下基于概念和进化信息对软件进化进行全面分析；2)定义基于SE2的软件维护任务的新方法；3)执行实证研究以评估SE2和支持的方法。我们解决方案的核心是最先进的数据挖掘、信息检索和程序分析方法。该研究将建立理论基础，并提供新颖的实际解决方案，以便在SE2框架内统一表示、分析和使用它们。在更广泛的影响中，该项目包括在开源许可下生产软件工具，以及与工业界合作转让技术。

Software maintenance and evolution is a vital and resource consuming phase of the software lifecycle. Introducing software changes is a particularly complex phenomenon in case of long-lived, large-scale, and globally distributed systems. Years of research efforts have recognized three core tasks to support developers during software maintenance: feature location (a starting point of a change in source code), impact analysis (other software entities that are also change prone), and expert developer recommendations (appropriate developers to implement changes). The research will develop a novel one-stop solution for these tasks by integrating and mining the latent information cluttered in structured and unstructured software artifacts produced and constantly changed during evolution of software systems, which are largely untapped in current solutions.This research program has three main goals: 1) Define a new integrated framework SE2 for a comprehensive analysis of software evolution, based on conceptual and evolutionary information, under a single umbrella, 2) Define new methodologies for software maintenance tasks based on SE2, and 3) Perform empirical studies to evaluate SE2 and supported methodologies. Central to our solution are the state of the art data mining, information retrieval, and program analysis methods. The research will formulate both theoretical foundations and deliver novel practical solutions to uniformly represent, analyze, and use them within the SE2 framework. Among the broader impacts the project includes production of software tools under open source licenses and collaboration with industry to transfer technology.