SmartGroups: Focusing on Task-Relevant Source Artifacts in IDEs

Abstract

Navigating large software systems, even when using a modern IDE, is difficult, since conceptually related software artifacts are distributed in a huge software space. For most software maintenance tasks, only a small fraction of the entire software space is actually relevant. The IDE, however, does not reveal the task relevancy of source artifacts, thus developers cannot easily focus on the artifacts required to accomplish their tasks. SmartGroups help developers to perform software maintenance tasks by representing groups of source artifacts that are relevant for the current task. Relevancy is determined by analyzing historical navigation and modification activities, evolutionary information, and runtime information. The prediction quality of SmartGroups is validated with a benchmark evaluation using recorded development activities and evolutionary information from versioning systems.