Publication

ISBN	978-1-4503-4524-8
Title of proceedings	Proceedings of the 11th Edition of the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies
DOI	10.1145/2991041.2991048

URL	http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/papers/Spas16b.pdf
Type of Open Access	Website

In this paper we propose the idea of constructing an Object Repository -- a repository of code snippets that, when executed, produce an instance of some class. Such a repository may be useful for several software engineering tasks like augmenting software documentation, testing object inspectors, improving program comprehension etc. We mine code snippets from existing software systems via brute force execution of code segments obtained through converting AST nodes of methods to source code. The gathered snippets are known to be executable, and this is a novelty which is not possible with existing approaches. We show that applying the proposed approach to 141 open source Pharo projects results in an Object Repository that can instantiate almost 80\% of the available classes in these projects.