Context-based recommendation to support problem solving in software development

Abstract

During the software development process, developers are often faced with problem solving situations. For instance, it is common the occurrence of exceptions, that originate stack traces in the Console View of the IDE. These situations motivate the developer to use the Web to search for information. However, there is a gap between the IDE and the Web, requiring developers to spend significant time searching for relevant information and navigating through web pages in a Web browser. We propose to process the information of exception stack traces and retrieve question-answering web resources to help developers. We developed a tool that integrates recommendation of question/answer web resources in Eclipse, according to the context of these exception stack traces. The results of a preliminary experimentation are promising, showing that our approach performs better than a simple keyword-based approach.