Automatically locating framework extension examples

Abstract

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 documentation, developers often desire implementation examples for concrete guidance. We propose an approach that automatically locates implementation examples from a code base given lightweight documentation of a framework. Based on our experience with concern-oriented documentation, we devised an approach 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. We implemented our approach in a tool and conducted a study comparing the results of our tool with results provided by Eclipse committers, showing that our approach can locate examples with high precision. © 2008 ACM.