SE-FCA: A Model of Software Evolution with Formal Concept Analysis

Softwares are naturally evolved to cope with various changing system requirements. Software evolution includes a series of activities to analyze, assess, and validate the changes. This paper proposes an integrated software evolution model, namely SE-FCA, to support four core software evolution activities: program comprehension, change impact analysis, regression testing, and fault localization. These four activities are integrated and supported under the formal concept analysis technique, which is efficient to deal with the relation between entities and entity properties to provide a remarkable insight into the structure of the original relation. These activities are evaluated in a unified empirical environment. The empirical study shows the effectiveness of these activities under the SE-FCA model.