About the Mission
Application frameworks have become an integral part of today’s software development — this is hardly surprising given their promised benefits such as reduced costs, higher quality, and shorter time to market. But using an application framework is not free of cost. Before frameworks can be used efficiently, software developers have to learn their correct usage which often results in high initial training costs.
To reduce these training costs, framework developers provide diverse documentation addressing different information needs. Tutorials, for instance, describe typical usage scenarios, and thus give the application developer an initial insight into the workings of the framework. However, their benefit quickly disappears when problems have to be solved that differ from standard usage scenarios. Now, API documentation becomes the most important resource for software developers. Documentation is scanned for hints relevant for the own problem at hand but if it does not provide the required information, the most costly part of the research begins: The source code of other programs is investigated that successfully used the framework in a similar way. But learning correct framework usage from these real-world examples is difficult. The problem with these examples is that they also contain application-specific code that obscures the view on what is really important for using the framework. This significantly complicates the understanding process which makes the training a challenging and time-consuming task again. However, source code of other applications seems to be a valuable source of information.
The Code Recommenders project develops tools that automatically analyze large-scale code repositories, extract interesting data from it and integrate this information back into the IDE where it is reused by developers on their daily work. The vision of the project is to create a context-sensitive IDE that learns from what is relevant in a given code situation from its users and, in turn, give back this knowledge to other users. If you like, you may think of it like a collaborative way of sharing knowledge over the IDE.