Lowering the barrier to reuse through test-driven search

Dedicated software search engines that index open source software repositories or in-house software assets significantly enhance the chance of finding software components suitable for reuse. However, they still leave the work of evaluating and testing components to the developer. To significantly change the risk/cost/benefit tradeoff involved in software reuse, search engines need to be supported by user friendly environments that deliver code search functionality, non-intrusively, right to developers' fingertips during key software development activities and significantly raise the quality of search results. In this position paper we describe our attempt to realize this vision through an Eclipse plug-in, Code Conjurer, in tandem with the code search engine, merobase.