Configuring Topic Models for Software Engineering
Tasks in TraceLab - Online Appendix

This web page is a companion to our 7th International Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering (TEFSE'13) submission entitled "Configuring Topic Models for Software Engineering Tasks in TraceLab"

This website contains the TraceLab experiment that implements the LDA-GA technique introduced at ICSE'13:

Panichella, A., Dit, B., Oliveto, R., Di Penta, M., Poshyvanyk, D., and De Lucia, A., "How to Effectively Use Topic Models for Software Engineering Tasks? An Approach based on Genetic Algorithms", in Proceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'13), San Francisco, CA, May 18-26, 2013, pp. 522-531 (18.5% acceptance ratio) [pdf] [data] [teaser video]

Additional data related to the original experiment can be found here.

How to Install TraceLab

TraceLab can be downloaded from the TraceLab download page on the CoEST website. If needed, you may be required to create a free account in order to download TraceLab and your TraceLab key file. Follow the instructions of the installer, then download your unique TraceLab key and place it in your "[USER_FOLDER/]Documents/TraceLab" directory.

Additionally, this experiment requires the TraceLab RPlugin components. Download the package from this page. Once downloaded, double click the package file to automatically install it in TraceLab.

How to Run the LDA-GA experiment in TraceLab

Open the experiment in TraceLab. You will need to specify certain settings for your machine and datasets.
  • Data
    • Open the info pane on the "Source Artifacts" component and set the configuration to the source artifacts directory of the dataset.
    • Open the info pane on the "Target Artifacts" component and set the configuration to the target artifacts directory of the dataset.
    • Open the info pane on the "Oracle" component and set the configuration to the oracle file of the dataset.
  • Dependencies
    • Open the info pane on the "LDA-GA Configuration" component and set the "RScript executable" configuration to the location of RScript.exe on your computer. This is usually C:\Program Files\R\R-X.XX.X\bin\RScript.exe. A script will attempt to install any R libraries you are missing - this will require your permission.
    • Repeat for the "Configured LDA" component.
    • Repeat for the "Baseline LDA" component.
Now you are ready to run the experiment. This may take some time, depending on the settings!

Participants


We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the NSF on this research project.