CodeRAnts: A recommendation method based on collaborative searching and ant colonies, applied to reusing of open source code

Abstract

This paper presents CodeRAnts, a new recommendation method based on a collaborative searching technique and inspired on the ant colony metaphor. This method aims to fill the gap in the current state of the matter regarding recommender systems for software reuse, for which prior works present two problems. The first is that, recommender systems based on these works cannot learn from the collaboration of programmers and second, outcomes of assessments carried out on these systems present low precision measures and recall and in some of these systems, these metrics have not been evaluated. The work presented in this paper contributes a recommendation method, which solves these problems.

Keywords

• Recommender Systems on Software Engineering
• recommendation method based on collaborative searching
• software reuse
• open source software
• ant colony