Support for Software Maintenance Using Latent Semantic Analysis

The paper describes the results of applying semantic (versus structural) methods to the problems of software maintenance and program comprehension. Here, the focus is on tools to assist programmer to understand large legacy software systems. The method applied, Latent Semantic Analysis, is a corpus-based statistical method for inducing and representing aspects of the meanings of words and passages (of natural language) reflective in their usage. This methodology is assessed for application to the domain of software components (i.e., source code and its accompanying documentation). The intent of applying Latent Semantic Analysis to software components is to automatically induce a specific semantic meaning of a given component. Here, LSA is used as the basis to group software components, across files, to assist in program comprehension. This clustering is used in the understanding of a nontrivial software system, namely a version of Mosaic.