Supporting Program Comprehension through Fast Query response in Large-Scale Systems

Abstract

Software traceability provides support for various engineering activities including Program Comprehension; however, it can be challenging and arduous to complete in large industrial projects. Researchers have proposed automated traceability techniques to create, maintain and leverage trace links. Computationally intensive techniques, such as repository mining and deep learning, have showed the capability to deliver accurate trace links. The objective of achieving trusted, automated tracing techniques at industrial scale has not yet been successfully accomplished due to practical performance challenges. This paper evaluates high-performance solutions for deploying effective, computationally expensive trace-ability algorithms in large scale industrial projects and leverages generated trace links to answer Program Comprehension Queries. We comparatively evaluate four different platforms for supporting industrial-scale tracing solutions, capable of tackling software projects with millions of artifacts. We demonstrate that tracing solutions built using big data frameworks scale well for large projects and that our Spark implementation outperforms relational database, graph database (GraphDB), and plain Java implementations. These findings contradict earlier results which suggested that GraphDB solutions should be adopted for large-scale tracing problems.