Werner Janjic, Oliver Hummel, Colin Atkinson
Effective software reuse has long been regarded as an important foundation for a more engineering-like approach to software development. Proactive recommendation systems that have the ability to unobtrusively suggest immediately applicable reuse opportunities can become a crucial step toward realizing this goal and making reuse more practical. This chapter focuses on tools that support reuse through the recommendation of source code—reuse-oriented code recommendation systems (ROCR). These support a large variety of common code reuse approaches from the copy-and-paste metaphor to other techniques such as automatically generating code using the knowledge gained by mining source code repositories. In this chapter, we discuss the foundations of software search and reuse, provide an overview of the main characteristics of ROCR systems, and describe how they can be built.