Exploiting code search engines to improve programmer productivity

ABSTRACT

Code Search Engines (CSE) can serve as powerful resources of open source code, as they can search in billions of lines of open source code available on the web. The strength of CSEs can be used for several tasks like searching relevant code samples, identifying hotspots, and finding bugs. However, the major limitations in using CSEs for these tasks are that the returned samples are too many and they are often partial. Our framework addresses the preceding limitations and thereby helps in using CSEs for these tasks. We showed the effectiveness of our framework with two tools developedbased on our framework.

REFERENCES

• 1: Reid Holmes , Gail C. Murphy, Using structural context to recommend source code examples, Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, May 15-21, 2005, St. Louis, MO, USA [doi>10.1145/1062455.1062491]
• 2: David Mandelin , Lin Xu , Rastislav Bodík , Doug Kimelman, Jungloid mining: helping to navigate the API jungle, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 12-15, 2005, Chicago, IL, USA
• 3: Naiyana Sahavechaphan , Kajal Claypool, XSnippet: mining For sample code, Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.3 Coding Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: Object-oriented programming

General Terms:
Experimentation, Languages

Keywords:
code examples, code reuse, code search engine, hotspots