research-article

Moldable, context-aware searching with Spotter

Authors:

Oscar Nierstrasz,

Stefan Reichhart,

Aliaksei SyrelAuthors Info & Claims

Onward! 2016: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software

Pages 128 - 144

https://doi.org/10.1145/2986012.2986023

Published: 20 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Software systems involve many different kinds of domain-specific and interrelated software entities. A common strategy employed by developers to deal with this reality is to perform exploratory investigations by means of searching. Nevertheless, most integrated development environments (IDEs) support searching through generic and disconnected search tools. This impedes search tasks over domain-specific entities, as considerable effort is wasted by developers locating and linking data and concepts relevant to their application domains.

To tackle this problem we propose Spotter, a moldable framework for supporting contextual-aware searching in IDEs by enabling developers to easily create custom searches for domain objects. In this paper we motivate a set of requirements for Spotter and show, through usage scenarios, that Spotter improves program comprehension by reducing the effort required to find and search through concepts from a wide range of domains. Furthermore, we show that by taking code into account, Spotter can provide a single entry point for embedding search support within an IDE.

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Cited By

Sulír MPorubän JRosu GDi Penta MNguyen T(2017)RuntimeSearch: Ctrl+F for a running programProceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.5555/3155562.3155613(388-393)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3155562.3155613
Syrel A(2017)Towards a live, moldable code editorCompanion Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming10.1145/3079368.3079376(1-3)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3079368.3079376
Sulir MPoruban J(2017)RuntimeSearch: Ctrl+F for a running program2017 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE.2017.8115651(388-393)Online publication date: Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2017.8115651

Index Terms

Moldable, context-aware searching with Spotter
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

Onward! 2016: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software

October 2016

268 pages

ISBN:9781450340762

DOI:10.1145/2986012

General Chair:
Eelco Visser
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
,
Program Chairs:
Emerson Murphy-Hill
North Carolina State University, USA
,
Crista Lopes
University of California at Irvine, USA

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 October 2016

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Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

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SPLASH '16

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SIGPLAN

SPLASH '16: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

November 2 - 4, 2016

Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Cited By

Sulír MPorubän JRosu GDi Penta MNguyen T(2017)RuntimeSearch: Ctrl+F for a running programProceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.5555/3155562.3155613(388-393)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3155562.3155613
Syrel A(2017)Towards a live, moldable code editorCompanion Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming10.1145/3079368.3079376(1-3)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3079368.3079376
Sulir MPoruban J(2017)RuntimeSearch: Ctrl+F for a running program2017 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE.2017.8115651(388-393)Online publication date: Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2017.8115651

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