Searching repositories of web application models

Abstract

Project repositories are a central asset in software development, as they preserve the technical knowledge gathered in past development activities. However, locating relevant information in a vast project repository is problematic, because it requires manually tagging projects with accurate metadata, an activity which is time consuming and prone to errors and omissions. This paper investigates the use of classical Information Retrieval techniques for easing the discovery of useful information from past projects. Differently from approaches based on textual search over the source code of applications or on querying structured metadata, we propose to index and search the models of applications, which are available in companies applying Model-Driven Engineering practices. We contrast alternative index structures and result presentations, and evaluate a prototype implementation on real-world experimental data. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.