Spyglass Documentations

Software development environments have evolved to make it easy for third parties to integrate a variety of tools into the environment. Previous research has shown that developers often do not use or know all of the tools available in development environments that they regularly use. The most common solution to alleviate this problem is to provide a means to search through passive help documents. However, this approach requires a developer to be able to express her desires in a form understood by a search engine.

To overcome this limitation, we introduce an active help system to recommend navigation tools because previous research has shown a substantial amount of effort expended by a developer on a software evolution task is related to navigation. Our approach infers which structurally related pieces of information are of interest to a developer and determines when the navigation performed by the developer between the related information is suboptimal. In suboptimal navigation situations, our approach recommends a tool that would enable more efficient navigation.

Our approach was implemented as a prototypical active help system, called Spyglass, in IBM's Rational Team Concert development environment. Below are instructions for those who are interested in modifying or extending the help system.

Setting up

Spyglass is built based on RTC release 1.0 (but the newer version may work, you can try later). So, first, you need to create an account on <http://www.jazz.net>. Then, do the following:

1. Go to Downloads page. On the left menu, select All. Download the RTC release 1.0 both server and client.
2. Follow the instruction on this web page <https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Main/ComponentDevelopmentSetup>. You can ignore the section "Additional Setup Steps".

Checking out the project source code

Currently, Spyglass source code is stored in the CVS repository accessible by all members of the Software Practices Lab. To check out the project into your RTC workspace, please do the following:

• Right click in the Package Explorer View > New > Project > Projects from CVS
• Create a new repository connection
  Host: cascade.cs.ubc.ca
  Repository Path: /cs/spl/se/people/pviriya/cvs
  Connection Type: extssh (Use default port)
  Username & Password: Your username and password to login to cascade.cs.ubc.ca

• If the repository path doesn't work, please try </ubc/cs/research/spl/se/people/pviriya/cvs>
• Checkout the projects that has the name starting with "ca.ubc.cs..." and "org.eclipse.mylyn...". The projects that has the name starting with "ca.ubc.cs..." are the ones directly related to Spyglass. The other "org.eclipse.mylyn..." are related to Mylyn Monitor API that we have modified to be used by Spyglass. These source files varied substantially from the original ones.

-- PetcharatViriyakattiyaporn - 03 Jun 2009