SurfClipse: Context-Aware Meta Search in the IDE
This addresses the inefficiency of traditional web searches for software developers by providing integrated, context-sensitive debugging support, though it is incremental as it builds on existing search and IDE tools.
The paper tackles the problem of developers needing to search the web for debugging solutions by proposing SurfClipse, a context-aware meta search tool that analyzes exceptions in the IDE and recommends relevant queries and web pages, achieving results from three search engines and a Q&A site with refined rankings.
Despite various debugging supports of the existing IDEs for programming errors and exceptions, software developers often look at web for working solutions or any up-to-date information. Traditional web search does not consider the context of the problems that they search solutions for, and thus it often does not help much in problem solving. In this paper, we propose a context-aware meta search tool, SurfClipse, that analyzes an encountered exception and its context in the IDE, and recommends not only suitable search queries but also relevant web pages for the exception (and its context). The tool collects results from three popular search engines and a programming Q & A site against the exception in the IDE, refines the results for relevance against the context of the exception, and then ranks them before recommendation. It provides two working modes--interactive and proactive to meet the versatile needs of the developers, and one can browse the result pages using a customized embedded browser provided by the tool. Tool page: www.usask.ca/~masud.rahman/surfclipse