CoMoGen: An Approach to Locate Relevant Task Context by Combining Search and Navigation

Developers spend a substantial amount of time searching and navigating source code to locate the relevant places for performing a change task. While the searching and navigating are highly intertwined and related, most current approaches focus either on search or on navigation support for developers, keeping the two distinct. In this paper, we present an approach called CoMoGen that combines search and navigation by expanding, ranking and visualizing search results with navigation context. In an experimental analysis we found that our approach is able to generate small task-relevant context models that locates more relevant search results than state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice search approaches. A small, preliminary user study with ten participants further yields promising preliminary findings that CoMoGen supports developers in better understanding and assessing the relevance of search results and in reducing navigation steps.