Test-driven reuse: Key to improving precision of search engines for software reuse

Abstract

The applicability of software reuse approaches in practice has long suffered from a lack of reusable material, but this situation has changed virtually over night: the rise of the open source movement has made millions of software artifacts available on the Internet. Suddenly, the existing (largely text-based) software search solutions did not suffer from a lack of reusable material anymore, but rather from a lack of precision as a query now might return thousands of potential results. In a reuse context, however, precisely matching results are the key for integrating reusable material into a given environment with as little effort as possible. Therefore a better way for formulating and executing queries is a core requirement for a broad application of software search and reuse. Inspired by the recent trend towards test-first software development approaches, we found test cases being a practical vehicle for reuse-driven software retrieval and developed a test-driven code search system utilizing simple unit tests as semantic descriptions of desired artifacts. In this chapter we describe our approach and present an evaluation that underlines its superior precision when it comes to retrieving reusable artifacts.