The IDE as a Scriptable Information System (extended version)

TL;DR

This paper presents an approach to enhance software development environments by integrating a scriptable, flexible information system that supports combining, visualizing, and acting on diverse development data sources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, extendable query mechanism within IDEs to improve information handling, visualization, and automation in software engineering tasks.

Findings

Supports diverse information processing and visualization

Enables rapid development of custom queries

Improves efficiency and reduces errors in development tasks

Abstract

Software engineering is extremely information-intensive. Every day developers work with source code, version repositories, issue trackers, documentation, web-based and other information resources. However, three key aspects of information work lack good support: (i) combining information from different sources; (ii) flexibly presenting collected information to enable easier comprehension; and (iii) automatically acting on collected information, for example to perform a refactoring. Poor support for these activities makes many common development tasks time-consuming and error-prone. We propose an approach that directly addresses these three issues by integrating a flexible query mechanism into the development environment. Our approach enables diverse ways to process and visualize information and can be extended via scripts. We demonstrate how an implementation of the approach can be used to rapidly write queries that meet a wide range of information needs.