Source code-based recommendation systems

Abstract

Although today’s software systems are composed of a diversity of software artifacts, source code remains the most up-to-date artifact and therefore the most reliable data source. It provides a rich and structured source of information upon which recommendation systems can rely to provide useful recommendations to software developers. Source code-based recommendation systems provide support for tasks such as how to use a given API or framework, provide hints on things missing from the code, suggest how to reuse or correct an existing code, or help novices learn a new project, programming paradigm, language, or style. This chapter highlights relevant decisions involved in developing source code-based recommendation systems. An in-depth presentation of a particular system we developed serves as a concrete illustration of some of the issues that can be encountered and of the development choices that need to be made when building such a system.