Recommending Useful Software Artifacts

Software development projects produce a large number of artifacts, including source code, documentation, bug reports, e-mail, newsgroup articles, and version information. The information in these artifacts can be helpful to a software developer trying to perform a task, such as adding a new feature, to a system. Unfortunately, it is often difficult for a software developer to locate the right information amongst the huge amount of data stored.

Hipikat is a tool intended to solve this problem. Hipikat recommends relevant software development artifacts based on the context in which a developer requests help from Hipikat.

Hipikat is an ongoing research project. To investigate our ideas, we are developing Hipikat as an Eclipse plug-in to support development of the Eclipse integrated development environment platform. Please be aware that this working prototype recommends only in the context of Eclipse development (that is, it knows only about artifacts in dev.eclipse.org:/home/eclipse CVS repository, eclipse.org Web site, bugs.eclipse.org Bugzilla and eclipse.tools newsgroup). In particular, Hipikat does not know about any other projects you might have in your workspace.

Hipikat is a joint project between the University of British Columbia, IBM Ottawa Software Lab, and the National Research Council of Canada.

For more information, contact Davor Cubranic.