E-Xplore: Enterprise API Explorer

摘要

Plenty of open source libraries and frameworks are available for developers these days for reuse in their projects. However the difficulty in finding and reusing the correct API among the hundreds of available APIs far outweighs the advantage of saving time. The problem is acute in enterprise codebase. Online forums like StackOverflow are no help for enterprise source code as they are closed in nature. We have developed a tool called E-Xplore that addresses this issue by letting the programmers search in large source codebase and browse them effectively. The tool also provides related artifacts in the form of result clustering. We evaluated E-Xplore with other tools via user study with developers working on an enterprise banking system with more than 10 million lines of code. A set of common tasks was given to the developers with and without the tool. We observed that the tool offered appreciable time and effort benefits in large scale software system development and maintenance. In this paper we describe the tool and its features which help develop and maintain source code effectively.