Recovering code to documentation links in OO systems

Software system documentation is almost always expressed informally, in natural language and free text. Examples include requirement specifications, design documents, user manual pages, system development journals, error logs and related maintenance reports. We propose an approach to establish and maintain traceability links between the source code and free-text documents. A premise of our work is that programmers use meaningful names for program's items, such as functions, variables, types, classes and methods. We believe that the application domain knowledge that programmers process when writing the code is often captured by the mnemonics for identifiers; therefore, the analysis of these mnemonics can help to associate high-level concepts with program concepts, and vice versa. In this paper, the approach is applied to software written in an object-oriented (OO) language, namely C++, to trace classes to manual sections.