Supporting collaborative software development by context-aware information retrieval facilities

The development of large software systems is a typical example for collaborative development efforts. Moreover, software development becomes more and more component-oriented. The source for these components can be either a component repository inside an organization or one of the emerging open source development networks available on the Internet. In this paper we describe an approach to search for potentially useful components during software development. Our approach is by no means restricted to components in an implementation oriented sense, but covers all types of artifacts created within a software development process. It is based on retrieval techniques for structures documents and uses contextual information about the user and his or her current work to refine the queries.