Revealing Mistakes in Concern Mapping Tasks: An Experimental Evaluation

Concern mapping is the activity of assigning a stakeholder’s concern to its corresponding elements in the source code. This activity is primordial to guide software maintainers in several tasks, such as understanding and restructuring the implementation of existing concerns. Even though different techniques are emerging to facilitate the concern mapping process, they are still manual and error-prone according to recent studies. Existing work does not provide any guidance to developers to review and correct concern mappings. In this context, this paper presents the characterization and classification of eight concern mapping mistakes commonly made by developers. These mistakes were found to be associated with various properties of concerns and modules in the source code. The mistake categories were derived from actual mappings of 10 concerns in 12 versions of industry systems. In order to further evaluate to what extent these mistakes also occur in wider contexts, we ran two experiments where 26 subjects mapped 10 concerns in two systems. Our experimental results confirmed the mapping mistakes that often occur when developers need to interact with the source code.