Improving software quality via code searching and mining

Enormous amount of open source code is available on the Internet and various code search engines (CSE) are available to serve as a means for searching in open source code. However, usage of CSEs is often limited to simple tasks such as searching for relevant code examples. In this paper, we present a generic life-cycle model that can be used to improve software quality by exploiting CSEs. We present three example software development tasks that can be assisted by our life-cycle model and show how these three tasks can contribute to improve the software quality. We also show the application of our life-cycle model with a preliminary evaluation.