Automatically Recommending Triage Decisions for Pragmatic Reuse Tasks

Reid Holmes, Tristan Ratchford, Martin P. Robillard, Robert J. Walker
2009 2009 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering  
Planning a complex software modification task imposes a high cognitive burden on developers, who must juggle navigating the software, understanding what they see with respect to their task, and deciding how their task should be performed given what they have discovered. Pragmatic reuse tasks, where source code is reused in a white-box fashion, is an example of a complex and error-prone modification task: the developer must plan out which portions of a system to reuse, extract the code, and
more » ... rate it into their own system. In this paper we present a recommendation system that automates some aspects of the planning process undertaken by developers during pragmatic reuse tasks. In a retroactive evaluation, we demonstrate that our technique was able to provide the correct recommendation 64% of the time and was incorrect 25% of the time. Our case study suggests that developer investigative behaviour is positively influenced by the use of the recommendation system.
doi:10.1109/ase.2009.65 dblp:conf/kbse/HolmesRRW09 fatcat:3mvvvliuobd7zhhncshrzx6chq