Using structural context to recommend source code examples

When coding to a framework, developers often become stuck, unsure of which class to subclass, which objects to instantiate and which methods to call. Example code that demonstrates the use of the framework can help developers make progress on their task. In this paper, we describe an approach for lo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 117 - 125
Main Authors Holmes, R., Murphy, G.C.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 2005
Subjects
Application software
Computer science
Database languages
Permission
Programming environments
Programming profession
Protocols
Software tools
Utility programs
Writing
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ISBN1595939632
ISSN0270-5257
DOI10.1109/ICSE.2005.1553554

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Summary:When coding to a framework, developers often become stuck, unsure of which class to subclass, which objects to instantiate and which methods to call. Example code that demonstrates the use of the framework can help developers make progress on their task. In this paper, we describe an approach for locating relevant code in an example repository that is based on heuristically matching the structure of the code under development to the example code. Our tool improves on existing approaches in two ways. First, the structural context needed to query the repository is extracted automatically from the code, freeing the developer from learning a query language or from writing their code in a particular style. Second, the repository can be generated easily from existing applications. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by reporting on a case study involving two subjects completing four programming tasks within the Eclipse integrated development environment framework.
ISBN:1595939632
ISSN:0270-5257
DOI:10.1109/ICSE.2005.1553554