Supporting Web-Based API Searches in the IDE Using Signatures

Developers frequently use the web to locate API examples that help them solve their programming tasks. While sites like Stack Overflow (SO) contain API examples embedded within their textual descriptions, developers cannot access this API knowledge directly. Instead they need to search for and browse results to select relevant SO posts and then read through individual posts to figure out which answers contain information about the APIs that are relevant to their task. This paper introduces an approach, called Scout, that automatically analyzes search results to extract API signature information. These signatures are used to group and rank examples and allow for a unique API-based presentation that reduces the amount of information the developer needs to consider when looking for API information on the web. This succinct representation enables Scout to be integrated fully within an IDE panel so that developers can search and view API examples without losing context on their development task. Scout also uses this integration to automatically augment queries with contextual information that tailors the developer's queries, and ranks the results according to the developer's needs. In an experiment with 40 developers, we found that Scout reduces the number of queries developers need to perform by 19% and allows them to solve almost half their tasks directly from the API-based representation, reducing the number of complete SO posts viewed by approximately 64%.