Acquiring general understanding of large software systems and components from which they are built can be a time consuming task, but having such an understanding is an important prerequisite to adding features or fixing bugs. In this paper we propose the tool, namely TopicXP, to support developers during such software maintenance tasks by extracting and analyzing unstructured information in source code identifier names and comments using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. TopicXP enables developers to gain an overview of a software system under analysis by extracting and visualizing natural language topics, which generally correspond to concepts or features implemented in software classes. TopicXP is implemented as an open-source Eclipse plug-in, which proposes interactive visualization of topics along with structural dependencies between underlying classes implementing these topics. The paper also presents the results of a preliminary user study aimed at evaluating TopicXP.
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机译：获取对其构建的大型软件系统和组件的一般理解可能是耗时的任务，但具有这样的理解是添加功能或修复错误的重要前提。在本文中，我们提出了该工具，即主题 XP ，在这种软件维护任务中支持开发人员，通过在源代码标识符名称和注释中提取和分析源代码标识符名称和注释中的非结构化信息。主题 XP 使开发人员能够通过提取和可视化自然语言主题来获得分析中的软件系统的概述，这通常对应于软件类中实现的概念或功能。主题 XP 被实现为开源Eclipse插件，该插件提出了主题的交互式可视化以及实现这些主题的基础类之间的结构依赖关系。本文还介绍了旨在评估主题 XP 的初步用户学习的结果。
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