Context-Based Search in Software Development

Authors

Abstract

Software developers usually spend a large amount of time navigating their own source code or searching for a specific source code artifact they need to work with. We propose a context based search approach that focuses in the source code artifacts that exist in the workspace of the developer. These artifacts are stored in a knowledge base and represented using ontologies. The contextual information of the developer is used to rank the search results according to their relevance for the developer. The results of an experiment performed with two groups of developers show that our approach has a positive impact in retrieving relevant artifacts for the developer, helping them find what they need more quickly and easily.

Keywords

Context, Information Retrieval, Ontologies

Subject

Artificial Intelligence

Related Project

SDiC: Software Development in Context

Conference

7th Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS) of the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), August 2012