Code Conjurer: Pulling Reusable Software out of Thin Air

  • Authors:
  • Oliver Hummel;Werner Janjic;Colin Atkinson

  • Affiliations:
  • Perot Systems Germany;University of Mannheim;University of Mannheim

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Software
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Accelerating the software development process by assembling new applications from existing software assets has been a goal of the IT industry for many years. However, most of today's systematic software reuse uses heavyweight approaches such as product-line engineering. Now, with the explosion in open source software repositories and the advent of a new generation of powerful software search engines, this is set to change. Code Conjurer is an Eclipse plug-in that extracts interface and test information from a developer's coding activities and uses this information to issue test-driven searches to a code-search engine. It presents components matching the developer's needs as reuse recommendations without disturbing the development work. Automated dependency resolution then allows selected components to be woven into the current project with minimal manual effort.