A graph database based crowdsourcing infrastructure for modelling and searching code structure

Abstract

Software reuse offers a solution to eliminate repeated work and improve efficiency and quality in the software development. In order to reuse existing software resources, software developers usually need to understand code structure of them. However, code structure is usually too complex to figure out. Therefore, it is helpful to demonstrate software developers the code structure they want to know. This paper presents a graph database based crowdsourcing infrastructure for modelling and searching code structure. In this paper, a graph based modelling paradigm of code structure is provided, which solves the problem that how code structure should be demonstrated. Software developers' search purposes are analyzed by natural language processing technique. A crowdsourcing mechanism is provided to integrate different code structure analysis algorithms for these different search purposes. Our work improves the efficiency of software reuse, and it is validated through an industrial case study.