Using and extending a framework is a challenging task whose difficulty is exacerbated by the poor documentation that generally comes with the framework. Even in the presence of such documentation, developers often desire implementation examples for concrete guidance. We propose an approach that automatically locates implementation examples from a code base given light-weight documentation of a framework. Based on our experience with concern-oriented documentation, we created a tool that uses the framework documentation as a template and that finds instances of this template in a code base. The concern instances represent self-contained and structured implementation examples: the relationships and the roles of parts composing the examples are uncovered and explained. With a study comparing the results of our tool with the expertise of Eclipse committers, we show that our approach can locate examples with high precision.
By: Barthélémy Dagenais; Harold Ossher
Published in: RC24515 in 2008
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