Searchbrowser - an Efficient Source Code Search Platform: Facilitating Reuse Through Findability

One of the key issues in making software development more efficient is facilitating reuse of existing software artifacts. In the context of large projects and a wealth of frameworks and components on the market, findability of the artifacts best matching your needs becomes essential for success. We present an architecture and implementation for a software artifact search engine using information retrieval technology. The SeachBrowser platform uses both semantic and structural information extracted from source code to provide efficient search capabilities. We show how this search engine can be used in order to aid manual development tasks such as impact analysis as well as development environment tooling such as auto-completion or refactoring features. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of artifact similarity to provide means to find and cluster related artifacts using our search engine.