Assisting concept assignment using probabilistic classification and cognitive mapping

Abstract

The problem of concept assignment, that is, the problem of mapping human oriented concepts to elements in the code base of a system under study, and approaches which facilitate concept assignment can be considered as central to assisting software engineers in comprehending the unfamiliar systems they encounter. This paper presents a technique called cognitive assignment that attempts to capture what expert engineers know about the systems they work with and uses that information to generate classifiers that are used to implement a ranked search over a set of software elements.