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Test-Driven Reuse: Key to Improving Precision of Search Engines for Software Reuse

  • Chapter
Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse

Abstract

The applicability of software reuse approaches in practice has long suffered from a lack of reusable material, but this situation has changed virtually over night: the rise of the open source movement has made millions of software artifacts available on the Internet. Suddenly, the existing (largely text-based) software search solutions did not suffer from a lack of reusable material anymore, but rather from a lack of precision as a query now might return thousands of potential results. In a reuse context, however, precisely matching results are the key for integrating reusable material into a given environment with as little effort as possible. Therefore a better way for formulating and executing queries is a core requirement for a broad application of software search and reuse. Inspired by the recent trend towards test-first software development approaches, we found test cases being a practical vehicle for reuse-driven software retrieval and developed a test-driven code search system utilizing simple unit tests as semantic descriptions of desired artifacts. In this chapter we describe our approach and present an evaluation that underlines its superior precision when it comes to retrieving reusable artifacts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For topological methods it is difficult to define or estimate recall and precision. See [26] for more.

  2. 2.

    Result source (visited Dec, 14th 2011): http://www.purpletech.com/xp/wake/src/Sheet.java

  3. 3.

    Which is hosted on sourceforge.net and available at www.code-conjurer.org

  4. 4.

    The only requirement is that the tests should be written according to best SE practices (e.g. the name of the test should reflect the class under test’s name).

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Colin Atkinson, Philipp Bostan, Daniel Brenner, Matthias Gutheil, Christian Ritter, Marcus Schumacher and Dietmar Stoll from the Software Engineering Group at the University of Mannheim for their contributions to developing the tools described in this chapter. Furthermore, we would like to express our gratitude for the helpful comments of the anonymous reviewers.

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  1. Software Engineering Group, University of Mannheim, 68131, Mannheim, Germany

    Oliver Hummel & Werner Janjic

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  1. Oliver Hummel
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Correspondence to Oliver Hummel .

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  1. Many Roads Studios, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Susan Elliott Sim

  2. Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA

    Rosalva E. Gallardo-Valencia

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Hummel, O., Janjic, W. (2013). Test-Driven Reuse: Key to Improving Precision of Search Engines for Software Reuse. In: Sim, S.E., Gallardo-Valencia, R.E. (eds) Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6596-6_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6596-6_12

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  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-6596-6

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