Search upon UML repositories with text matching techniques

Abstract

As the quantity of software artifacts, mainly source code and software models, stored in repositories increases, the need for their efficient search becomes more important. In this paper we propose content-based query (a.k.a query-by-example) approach for searching software model repositories, in order to retrieve significant models or model fragments. The query-by-example search conveys the user need in form of a model or pattern specified in a coarse way. Our approach incorporates analysis and indexing of models using textual information retrieval techniques, which exploit the knowledge of the metamodel the models conform to. This allows us to explore different segmentation granularities on models and different indexing techniques ranging from simple bag of words, to index structures which integrate metamodel information. We detail the proposed theoretical framework, the implementation of the method upon open-source architectures, and we discuss the results of our experiments upon a public dataset of UML models

Seeking the user interface

“…A variety of code search tools have been developed by researchers to help the programmer find the particular code they might be interested in out of the large available body of code [1][2][3][4][5][6]8,10,15,[17][18][19][20][21][22]24,25,28,32,39,40,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. This is in addition to commercial tools such as Ohloh (code.ohloh.net, formerly Koders at koders.com), Krugel (krugel.com), Github (www.github.com) and the now-defunct Google code search.…”