| This thesis presents IRiSS and JIRiSS, two Information Retrieval (IR) based software searching tools. IRiSS is developed as an add-on tool to the Visual Studio.NET Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C/C++ projects, while JIRiSS is developed as a plug-in tool to the Eclipse IDE for Java projects. These two tools implement IR based search engine to help software developers locate concepts in source code. Both tools allow developers to index the software, formulate natural language queries, and get the results as an ordered list of source code elements, such as classes or methods. In addition, the tools extend the standard "File Search" feature in the IDEs by adding structural information to the results. JIRiSS also provides means to use the software vocabulary to formulate precise queries. In addition, source code fragments can be used in JIRiSS as queries to locate parts of the software similar to the selected code fragment. |
