Supplying Collaborative Source-code Retrieval Tools to Software Developers

Collaborative information retrieval (CIR) and search-driven software development (SDD) are both new emerging research fields; the first one was born in response to the problem of satisfying shared information needs of groups of users that collaborate explicitly, and the second to explore source-code retrieval concept as an essential activity during software development process. Taking advantages of the recent contributions in CIR and SDD, in this paper we introduce a plug-in that can be added to the NetBeans IDE in order to enable remote teams of developers to use collaborative source-code retrieval tools. We also include in this work experimental results to confirm that CIR&SDD techniques give out better search results than individual strategies.