searching api usage examples in code repositories with sourcerer api search
We present Sourcerer API Search (SAS), a search interface to find API usage examples in large code repositories. SAS facilitates finding API usage examples by providing three unique features: (i) code snippets view for each result that shows the portions of code where APIs are used; (ii) Tag-cloud view of popular words to facilitate query reformulation, and (iii) filtering results using APIs to narrow search results. Furthermore, SAS uses a code index where each code entity is indexed with terms not only found in the entity but also in other entities having similar API usage. These features make SAS a novel search interface to find API usage examples in code repositories.
api search exploratory code search search driven development search user interface software information retrieval