The web is an important source of development-related resources, such as code examples, tutorials, and API documentation. Yet existing development environments are largely disconnected from these resources. In this work, we explore how to provide useful web page recommendations to developers by focusing on the problem of refinding web pages that a developer has previously used. We present the results of a study about developer browsing activity in which we found that 13.7% of developers visits to code-related pages are revisits and that only a small fraction (7.4%) of these were initiated through a low-cost mechanism, such as a bookmark. To assist with code-related revisits, we introduce Reverb, a tool which recommends previously visited web pages that pertain to the code visible in the developer's editor. Through a field study, we found that, on average, Reverb can recommend a useful web page in 51% of revisitation cases.

Software developers interact with the development environments they use by issuing commands that execute various programming tools, from source code formatters to build tools. However, developers often only use a small subset of the commands offered by modern development environments, reducing their overall development fluency. In this paper, we use several existing command recommender algorithms to suggest new commands to developers based on their existing command usage history, and also introduce several new algorithms. By running these algorithms on data submitted by several thousand Eclipse users, we describe two studies that explore the feasibility of automatically recommending commands to software developers. The results suggest that, while recommendation is more difficult in development environments than in other domains, it is still feasible to automatically recommend commands to developers based on their usage history, and that using patterns of past discovery is a useful way to do so.

Using variables before assigning any values to them are known to result in critical failures in an application. Few compilers warn about the use of some, but not all uses of un-initialized variables. The problem persists, especially in COBOL systems, due to lack of reliable program analysis tools. A critical reason is the presence of large number of control flow paths due to the use of un-structured constructs of the language. We present the problems faced by one of our big clients in his large, COBOL based software system due to the use of un-initialized variables. Using static data and control-flow analysis to detect them, we observed large number of false positives (imprecision) introduced due to the unrealizable paths in the un-structured COBOL code. We propose a solution to address the realizability issue. The solution is based on the summary based function analysis, which is adapted for COBOL Paragraphs and Sections, to handle the perform-through and fall-through control-flow, and is significantly engineered to scale for large programs (single COBOL program extending to tens of thousands of lines). Using this technique, we noted very large reduction, 45% on an average, in the number of false positives for the un-initialized variables.