An Approach to Context Modeling in Software Development

Authors

Abstract

The contextual information associated to the work of a developer can be used to identify the source code artifacts that are more relevant at a specific point in time. This information is essential to reduce the effort spent by developers when searching for needed source code artifacts. We propose a context model that represents the focus of attention of the developer at each moment. This context model adapts automatically to changes in the focus of attention of the developer by detecting context transitions. We have developed a prototype that was submitted to an experiment with a group of developers. The results collected show that the use of our context model to rank, elicit and filter relevant source code elements for the developer is very promising.

Keywords

Context Modeling, Context Capture, Context Transitions, Software Development, IDE

Subject

Artificial Intelligence

Related Project

SDiC: Software Development in Context

Book Chapter

Software and Data Technologies, Communications in Computer and Information Science, 13, pp. 188-202, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, December 2013

DOI