Suade: Topology-Based Searches for Software Investigation

The investigation of a software system prior to a modification task often constitutes an important fraction of the overall effort associated with the task. We present Suade, an Eclipse plug-in to automatically generate suggestions for software investigation. The goal of Suade is to increase the efficiency with which developers explore the source code by recommending locations that are likely to be relevant to the task. Based on a context of software elements (fields and methods) explicitly specified by a developer, Suade automatically generates other elements that are likely to be relevant given the context, by analyzing the topology of structural dependencies in a software system.