Automating Reusable-Procedure Discovery through Developer's Action Analysis

Reusable procedures can improve the efficiency of software development since they describe necessary steps for completing programming tasks. However, these procedures are often not fully provided in manuals, and discovering such procedures requires a lot of experience. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically discover reusable procedures from developer actions. First, our approach collects developers' action sequences for a similar task. Second, our approach divides sequences into sub-sequences. Third, by comparing steps of sub-sequences, our approach eliminates task-unrelated steps and mine the reusable steps. Finally, by combining the reusable steps together in a reasonable way, our approach generates a reusable procedure with more than one path. Based on our approach, we implemented a tool (Eclipse plugin). We conduct an experiment to evaluate the correctness of our approach. We also conduct an empirical study to evaluate the usefulness of generated procedure.