Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Finding Open Source code and components with Unit Tests

Yesterday I read an interesting article in IEEE Software about Code Conjurer Eclipse plugin and Merobase.

Merobase is a code search engine supporting some quite interesting features, among them querying by writing Unit tests. According to the IEEE Article, candidates matching the interface expected by the implementing class (under test) is actually tested with your test on the Merobase server.

Classes found that successfully fulfills the expectations in the test is shown in the search result.

Another interesting feature, is that results can be filtered in Code Conjurer showing only matches satisfying compliant licensing regimes that you specify.

So far I have only tested the web browser search interface, with some varying quality in the result. Anyhow this is a very exciting idea, and is probably something companies with large code bases would want to have in house.

This service has a real potential to reduce the "reinvent-the-wheel" problem, and improve collaboration inside and between organizations. In addition it can even get more people writing good unit tests.

Just one more thought: Why hasn't Google already done this with Google Code Search?