Learning Design Rules in Code

Abstract

Developers often face difficulties in trying to understand how to write code correctly which follows a project’s design rules. In Active Documentation, developers can more easily write code correctly by following explicitly identified design rules. We are currently building a technique to mine potential design rules from code. Specifically, we devised a technique for ranking potential design rules for the user to view based on the degree of interest developers have expressed with specific code elements. We calculate degree of interest by observing the caret location of where the user has recently navigated in code and inferring related elements as well as through the searches developers have performed. Through using this data, we believe our technique may help more effectively rank potential design rules for the developer to view and inspect.