Predicting code context models for software development tasks

ABSTRACTCode context models consist of source code elements and their relations relevant to a development task. Prior research showed that making code context models explicit in software tools can benefit software development practices, e.g., code navigation and searching. However, little focus has been put on how to proactively form code context models. In this paper, we explore the proactive formation of code context models based on the topological patterns of code elements from interaction histories for a project. Specifically, we first learn abstract topological patterns based on the stereotype roles of code elements, rather than on specific code elements; we then leverage the learned patterns to predict the code context models for a given task by graph pattern matching. To determine the effectiveness of this approach, we applied the approach to interaction histories stored for the Eclipse Mylyn open source project. We found that our approach achieves maximum F-measures of 0.67, 0.33 and 0.21 for 1-step, 2-step and 3-step predictions, respectively. The most similar approach to ours is Suade, which supports 1-step prediction only. In comparison to this existing work, our approach predicts code context models with significantly higher F-measure (0.57 over 0.23 on average). The results demonstrate the value of integrating historical and structural approaches to form more accurate code context models.