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When gathering requirements for new software projects, it is often cost-effective to find similar applications that can be used as the basis for prototypes rather than building them from scratch. However, finding such sample applications can be difficult, often making prototyping time-consuming and expensive. We offer a novel approach called Exemplar (EXEcutable exaMPLes ARchive) for finding highly relevant software projects from a large archive of executable applications. After a programmer enters a query that contains high-level concepts (e.g., toolbar, download, smart card), Exemplar uses information retrieval and program analysis to retrieve applications that implement these concepts. We hypothesize that Exemplar will be effective and efficient in helping programmers to quickly find highly relevant applications to support prototyping.
Grechanik et al. (Tue,) studied this question.