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Due to the fact that we observed that developers look for error related information
when their program shows an error, we believe that it would be helpful for develop-
ers if the IDE that throws an exception will also run a query on the Web with that
exception. In that way, the IDE can show the developers not only the line where the
exception was detected and the stacktrace, but also information found on the Web
related to this error including potential causes, potential solutions, and what other
people did when they encounter the same error.
13.6.1.3 Present Results from Web Searches in the Development
Environment
We observed that sometimes after developers found a solution on the Web, they
put side by side a window with the source code found and a window with their
source code in an IDE. For this reason, we believe that it would be useful if de-
velopers could have both, their source code and results from the Web in the same
environment. Recent tools such as CodeGenie [
8
] and Blueprint [
2
] have explored
this integration between the IDE and the Web.
We expect that in the future developers will have online IDEs and the integration
of search results from the Web and their own code stored in the cloud would be
easier and more natural.
13.6.2 Implications for Tools for Non-opportunistic Searches
In our empirical studies, we observed that developers look for the same type of
information to compare open source projects. Based on this observation, we believe
that it would be helpful if developers would have a tool that gathers this information
and shows it in a comparative way. There are not many applications that have this
functionality. One of the few is Ohloh, which allows developers to enter the name
of three open source projects and shows the same information for all the three sys-
tems in a table to facilitate comparison. We used Ohloh to compare three systems
searched by one of our participants, Oscar and Fig.
13.3
shows the results of this
comparison.
For each of the projects, Ohloh shows general information including how
recently the repository was updated, the home page, and license. It also includes
repository activity for the project, code analysis, and reputation of the project given
by Ohloh users.
We believe that tools that allow comparison of systems will be useful for
developers. These tools should be flexible enough to support comparisons of more
than three open source projects. Currently, Ohloh supports only comparison of three
open source projects, as previously mentioned. However, we observed that a devel-
oper compared ten open source systems and he was planning on evaluating more
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