A Method For Identifying Evolutionary Activity For Open Source Software

Software evolution has became an important part in software life cycle, and is a hot research field in software engineering. However, now too much research focus on the process of software evolution, and not proposes adoption a feasibility method to confirmation evolved software coincides with aim of evolution, especially now many software need to verification.In many evolved software, validate the open source software is very difficult, firstly because the open source software have group intelligence development, process of development can not controlling and modeling, and any other characteristics; secondly, a open source software is lack of relatively complete documents, so can not find the modified code during evolution; last, open source software not have a completely development plan, so it is short of a management to control the time, money and human, people around the world can modify a software an any time. Summary the three points, the traditional method of validation can apply to open source software, so adopt a software validation method from semantic function. Using the topic model to deal with the feature in software, get the topic information in code and feature location to achieve evolution validation.The main works of this research as follows:First, aim at the open source software that very few people research, adopt a effective validation method from semantic function;Second, adopt machine learning method to research the problem in software engineering, especially in software evolution no longer limited to formalization, but use the source code of ArgoUML to performance the experiment, get the result of data to do the research;Third, from the result, this paper’s method can distinguish the evolved and unevolved clearly, and compare with other validation method, the results present this paper’s method is better;Fourth, a software has been developed as this paper describe, and it can validation the open source software.This paper aim at open source software, takes advantage of source code in open software, and makes experiment, this method have high efficiency, low labor cost and low program understanding requirements, can achieve validation the open source software quickly.