Supporting information exchange among software developers through the development of Collaborative Information Retrieval utilities

Software developers produce a significant amount of knowledge, everyday facing a significant amount of engineering challenges and resolving them using a significant number of information resources. Once the task that they are facing is complete and the results of their effort are embedded into the source code this knowledge is very rarely shared with the software development community. As a consequence other software developers when faced with the same or similar problem have to solve it by themselves wasting a significant amount of time and resources every day. This paper proposes a Collaborative Information Recommender (CIR) system which intends to address the problem outlined above and facilitate the exchange of information between software developers. The proposed CIR system not only supports a direct reuse of the code related information found by other developers but also supports the creation and management of very problem focused social and knowledge networks.