Assisting artifact retrieval in software engineering projects

The research presented in this paper focuses on the issue of how a recommender system can support the task of searching documents and artifacts constructed in a software development project. The "A LA" (Associative Linking of Attributes) system represents a recommender facility built on top of a document management system. The facility provides assistance to finding items by utilising hypertextually connected metadata. In order to determine metadata relationships "A LA" employs techniques of content analysis together with exploiting user-generated metadata and usage logs. An evaluation study that compares querying using a full text search approach with the "A LA" method for finding relevant documents was conducted.