Compare and contrast: Visual exploration of source code examples

Abstract

Understanding the commonalities and differences of a set of source code examples can help developers to understand or to evolve application programming interfaces (APIs). While several approaches exist to assist developers in locating source code examples, they often present their results only in a basic list view, with at most an indication of the relationship to the search query; unfortunately, they offer no information on how the results relate to one another. A developer is then faced with the highly manual task of exploring these examples to discern their similarities and differences. This paper describes our prototype tool (called Guido) for exploring source code examples, using their structural correspondences. The Guido tool uses multiple coordinated views to visualize the relationships between examples, in order to assist the developer in identifying common and unique traits between them.