An Approach to Context Modeling in Software Development

Abstract

The contextual information associated to the work of a developer can be used to identify the source code artifacts that are more relevant at a specific point in time. This information is essential to reduce the effort spent by developers when searching for needed source code artifacts. We propose a context model that represents the focus of attention of the developer at each moment. This context model adapts automatically to changes in the focus of attention of the developer by detecting context transitions. We have developed a prototype that was submitted to an experiment with a group of developers. The results collected show that the use of our context model to rank, elicit and filter relevant source code elements for the developer is very promising. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.