While working in an IDE, developers typically deal with a large number of different artifacts at the same time. The software development process requires that they repeatedly switch between different artifacts, which often depends on searching for these artifacts in the source code structure. We propose a tool that integrates context-based search and recommendation of source code artifacts in Eclipse. The artifacts are collected from the workspace of the developer and represented using ontologies. A context model of the developer is used to improve search and give recommendations of these artifacts, which are ranked according to their relevance to the developer. The tool was tested by a group of developers and the results show that contextual information has an important role in retrieving relevant information for developers.

A software developer programming in an object-oriented programming language deals with a source code structure that may contain hundreds of source code elements. These elements are commonly related to each other and working on a specific element may require the developer to access other related elements. We propose a recommendation approach that uses the context of the developer to retrieve and rank recommendations of relevant source code elements in the IDE. These recommendations provide a shortcut to reach the desired elements and increase the awareness of the developer in relation to elements that may be of interest in that moment. We have tested our approach with a group of developers and the results show that context has a promising role in predicting and ranking the source code elements needed by a developer at each moment.