Full paper presentation ("Harnessing Stack Overflow for the IDE") @ RSSE 2012

1. Harnessing
for the IDE
Alberto Bacchelli, Luca Ponzanelli, and Michele Lanza
REVEAL @ Faculty of Informatics
University of Lugano, Switzerland

2. Who am I?

7. R E V E A L

8. “The software
development process also
heavily relies on the
knowledge and creativity of
individual software
developers and their
intense interactions.”
Supporting software development as knowledge-intensive and collaborative activity.
Yunwen Ye [WISER’06]

9. “The software
development process also
heavily relies on the
knowledge and creativity of
individual software
developers and their
intense interactions.”
Supporting software development as knowledge-intensive and collaborative activity.
Yunwen Ye [WISER’06]

10. Developers’
knowledge
is not enough

11. Manuals Documentation Online Resources

12. Outdated
Documentation

14. “Developers’ knowledge can only be
satisfied by posing questions to other
programmers.”
Maintaining Mental Models: A Study of Developer Work Habits
LaToza,Venolia, DeLine [ICSE’06]

16. General Purpose Technical

17. “Q&A online services are filling
archives with millions of entries
for software development.”
How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web? (NIER track)
Treude, Barzilay, Storey [ICSE’11]

18. Q&A services are
disconnected
from the IDE

19. Issue Found

20. Research...

21. Resolve Issue

22. Context
Switch

23. Developers need
suggestions

25. http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch

26. http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
Apache POST
XML POST Seahawk
Solr Search Query
data
Mbox Engine XML HTTP engine
Mbox
dump XML
files
files
files
Document Annotation Annotation
Cache
builder engine (SQLite)
XML dump DB System model
importer PostgreSQL
Data-collection Mechanism Eclipse

27. http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
Apache
XML Solr Search
data
Mbox
Data
Mbox Engine
dump
files
files
files
Collection
Document
builder
Mechanism XML dump
importer
DB
PostgreSQL
Data-collection Mechanism

28. http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
Query
Seahawk
engine
Recommendation Annotation
engine
Annotation
Cache
Engine
(SQLite)
System model
Eclipse

29. Query
engine
http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
Island Parsing

30. Query
engine
http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
/*Sample Class for a test*/
public class ExampleClass{
private final List<Integer> values;
public ExampleClass(){
values = new ArrayList<String>();
}
public int doSum(){
int sum = 0;
for(final Integer i : values)
sum += i;
return i;
}
}

31. Query
engine
http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
/*Sample Class for a test*/ Comment
public class ExampleClass{
private final List<Integer> values; Field
public ExampleClass(){
values = new ArrayList<String>(); Method
}
public int doSum(){
int sum = 0;
for(final Integer i : values)
sum += i; Method
return i;
}
}

32. Query
engine
http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
No AST

33. Query
engine
http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
Imports Code
define refines
the context the context

34. Seahawk
Query
engine
Annotation Annotation
Annotation
Cache
Cache
engine (SQLite)
(SQLite)
System model
http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
Eclipse
Annotations
=
Collaboration

35. http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
/*!
* @documentId http://stackoverflow.com/questions/567160
* @title C++ linker problem with wrapper
* @comment check it out!
* @author Seahawk
* @creationTime 2012.04.13 16:42:52.634 CEST
*/

36. http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
Integrates Stack Overflow in the IDE
Links relevant documents to code
Favors example-based programming
Automatically generates query from code

37. http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
Integrates Stack Overflow in the IDE
Links relevant documents to code
Favors example-based programming
Automatically generates query from code

38. http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
Integrates Stack Overflow in the IDE
Links relevant documents to code
Favors example-based programming
Automatically generates query from code

39. http://seahawk.inf.usi.ch
Integrates Stack Overflow in the IDE
Links relevant documents to code
Favors example-based programming
Automatically generates query from code

40. Interfaces and
well-known topics

41. Badly written code

42. Your personal
“Alfred”