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Before performing a modification task, a developer usually has to investigate the source code of a system to understand how to carry out the task. Discovering the code relevant to a change task is costly because it is an inherently human activity whose success depends on a large number of unpredictable factors, such as intuition and luck. Although studies have shown that effective developers tend to explore a program by following structural dependencies, no methodology is available to guide their navigation through the typically hundreds of dependency paths found in a non-trivial program. In this paper, we propose a technique to automatically propose and rank program elements that are potentially interesting to a developer investigating source code. Our technique is based on an analysis of the topology of structural dependencies in a program. It takes as input a set of program elements of interest to a developer …