CodeWeb: data mining library reuse patterns

Abstract

Developers learn to use a software library not just from its documentation but also from toy examples and existing real-life application code (e.g. by using grep). The CodeWeb tool takes this simple idea further by a deeper analysis of a large collection of applications to see what characteristic usage of the library is like. We demonstrate the tool by showing how the KDE core libraries are used in real-life KDE applications (KDE is a graphical desktop environment for UNIX). Moreover, we look at a recently-developed feature that helps software developers port an application from an old version of a library to a new one.