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Developers often require knowledge beyond the one they possess, which often boils down to consulting sources of information like Application Programming Interfaces (API) documentation, forums, Q&A websites, etc. Knowing what to search for and how is non- trivial, and developers spend time and energy to formulate their problems as queries and to peruse and process the results. We propose a novel approach that, given a context in the IDE, automatically retrieves pertinent discussions from Stack Overflow, evaluates their relevance, and, if a given confidence threshold is surpassed, notifies the developer about the available help. We have implemented our approach in Prompter, an Eclipse plug-in. Prompter has been evaluated through two studies. The first was aimed at evaluating the devised ranking model, while the second was conducted to evaluate the usefulness of Prompter.
Ponzanelli et al. (Tue,) studied this question.