Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/R71733/01
Title:	Hypothesis-Based Conceptual Mapping of Source Code
Principal Investigator:	Gold, Dr N
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Informatics
Organisation:	University of Manchester, The
Scheme:	Fast Stream
Starts:	15 April 2002	Ends:	14 April 2005	Value (£):	63,822
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Software Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
Program comprehension is the acquisition of knowledge about programs, a key issue of which is to understand the link between business concepts and their implementation in source code. Concept recovery is the re-establishment of links between source code and business concepts that is necessary because initial design knowledge is typically lost during the evolution of software systems. Earlier work by the principal investigator has produced a method for establishing such links using a variety of source code indicators e.g. variable names, procedure names, and comments. This work was demonstrated on industrial programs that had undergone some evolution and it became clear that the approach became more difficult to apply as the evolution progressed. The aim of this project is to understand the relationship between software evolution, the degradation of indicators and their structures, and the effectiveness of the concept recovery technique. Thus, limits of the method can be established and where appropriate extended to maintain performance on heavily maintained code. This will be achieved through empirical study of the methods performance on multiple versions of programs and it is hypothesised that improvements can be made by increasing the richness of the conceptual map produced by the Hypothesis-Based Concept Assignment technique.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Impacts
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Organisation Website:	http://www.man.ac.uk