Contribution for Research

[Alberto Bacchelli <al...@usi.ch>]

Dear Lucene .NET developers,

  I'm Alberto Bacchelli, a Ph.D. student in software engineering.

As suggested me by Itamar Syn-Hershko, I post this email
not only on Lucene Java dev, but also on this mailing list.
I hope you would be interested too ;)

We want to help new developers who join a new software system, and
we believe that a good first impression would attract more contributors.

Imagine a new developer joining Lucene:
As a first step, he needs a high-level view of the system.
Then, and this is what we want to address, he needs to know
what the most important classes of the system are --the hotspots.


We'd like to find *automated* methods to suggest a newbie
which classes he should start to study/understand.


To find the best recommendation method, we must know
the important classes of the system, and you,
as the system developers, are the only ones who can
answer this question.

If you agree to do so (and I really hope so :) )
we will create a small questionnaire for you,
that will take less than 15 minutes to be completed.

Thank you very much for reading this e-mail.
Please, reply to this thread or send me an e-mail
if you want to participate, and/or give me feedback.

Cheers,
  Alberto


PS: Since we want our work to respect the free software philosophy,
if you agree, we would make all your answers public (anonymyzed if you 
wish)
as a benchmark, so that other researchers can use your answers to propose
even better techniques for this task.