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Contribution to Book
NL-Based Query Refinement and Contextualized Code Search Results: A User Study
2014 Software Evolution Week: IEEE Conference on Software Maintenance, Reengineering and Reverse Engineering (CSMR-WCRE): Proceedings (2014)
  • Emily Hill, Montclair State University
  • Manuel Roldan-Vega, Montclair State University
  • Jerry Alan Fails, Montclair State University
  • Greg Mallet, Montclair State University
Abstract
As software systems continue to grow and evolve, locating code for software maintenance tasks becomes increasingly difficult. Source code search tools match a developer’s keyword-style or natural language query with comments and identifiers in the source code to identify relevant methods that may need to be changed or understood to complete the maintenance task. In this search process, the developer faces a number of challenges: (1) formulating a query, (2) determining if the results are relevant, and (3) if the results are not relevant, reformulating the query. In this paper, we present a NL-based results view for searching source code for maintenance that helps address these challenges by integrating multiple feedback mechanisms into the search results view: prevalence of the query words in the result set, results grouped by NL-based information, as a result list, and suggested alternative query words. Our search technique is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in, CONQUER, and has been empirically validated by 18 Java developers. Our results show that users prefer CONQUER over a state of the art search technique, requesting customization of the interface in future query reformulation techniques.
Keywords
  • feature location,
  • source code search,
  • software maintenance
Disciplines
Publication Date
2014
Editor
Serge Demeyer, Dave Binkley, and Filippo Ricca
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
ISBN
9781479937523
DOI
10.1109/CSMR-WCRE.2014.6747190
Citation Information
Emily Hill, Manuel Roldan-Vega, Jerry Alan Fails and Greg Mallet. "NL-Based Query Refinement and Contextualized Code Search Results: A User Study" Piscataway, NJ2014 Software Evolution Week: IEEE Conference on Software Maintenance, Reengineering and Reverse Engineering (CSMR-WCRE): Proceedings (2014) p. 34 - 43
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jerry-fails/8/