Morphology, Processing, and Integrating of Information from Large Source Code Warehouses for Decision Support

Abstract

Source code occurs in diverse programming languages with documentation using miscellaneous standards, comments in individual styles, extracted metrics or associated test cases that are hard to exploit through information retrieval or knowledge-discovery techniques. Typically, the information about object-oriented source code for a software system is distributed across several different sources, which makes processing complex. In this chapter we describe the morphology of object-oriented source code and how we (pre-) process, integrate and use it for knowledge discovery in software engineering in order to support decision-making regarding the refactoring, reengineering and reuse of software systems.