LiFUSO: A tool for Library Feature Unveiling based on Stack Overflow Posts

Description

Selecting a library from a vast ecosystem can be a daunting task. The libraries are not only numerous, but they also lack an enumeration of the features they offer. A feature enumeration for each library in an ecosystem would help developers select the most appropriate library for the task at hand. Within this enumeration, a library feature could take the form of a brief description together with the API references through which the feature can be reused. This paper presents LiFUSO, a tool that leverages Stack Overflow posts to compute a list of such features for a given library. Each feature corresponds to a cluster of related API references based on the similarity of the Stack Overflow posts in which they occur. Once LiFUSO has extracted such a cluster of posts, it applies natural language processing to describe the corresponding feature. We describe the engineering aspects of the tool, and illustrate its usage through a preliminary case study in which we compare the features uncovered for two competing libraries within the same domain. An executable version of the tool is available at https://github.com/softwarelanguageslab/lifuso and its demonstration video is accessible at https://youtu.be/tDE1LWa86cA.

Period	5 Oct 2022
Event title	The 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME) 2022
Event type	Conference
Conference number	38
Location	Limassol, CyprusShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International