Related papers: Evaluating How Developers Use General-Purpose Web-…
The immense amounts of source code provide ample challenges and opportunities during software development. To handle the size of code bases, developers commonly search for code, e.g., when trying to find where a particular feature is…
Code search engine is an essential tool in software development. Many code search methods have sprung up, focusing on the overall ranking performance of code search. In this paper, we study code search from another perspective by analyzing…
Study shows that software developers spend about 19% of their time looking for information in the web during software development and maintenance. Traditional web search forces them to leave the working environment (e.g., IDE) and look for…
Developers often search for reusable code snippets on general-purpose web search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft Bing. But some of these code snippets may have poor quality in terms of readability or understandability. In this…
Code search is a core software engineering task. Effective code search tools can help developers substantially improve their software development efficiency and effectiveness. In recent years, many code search studies have leveraged…
Consider the case where a programmer has written some part of a program, but has left part of the program (such as a method or a function body) incomplete. The goal is to use the context surrounding the missing code to automatically 'figure…
Web search engines have become the dominant tools for finding information on the Internet. Due to their popularity, users apply them to a wide range of search needs, from simple look-ups to rather complex information tasks. This paper…
Search engines are the preferred tools for finding information on the Web. They are advancing to be the common helpers to answer any of our search needs. We use them to carry out simple look-up tasks and also to work on rather time…
Improved software discovery is a prerequisite for greater software reuse: after all, if someone cannot find software for a particular task, they cannot reuse it. Understanding people's approaches and preferences when they look for software…
Software engineers spend a substantial amount of time using Web search to accomplish software engineering tasks. Such search tasks include finding code snippets, API documentation, seeking help with debugging, etc. While debugging a bug or…
Code search is an important information retrieval application. Benefits of better code search include faster new developer on-boarding, reduced software maintenance, and ease of understanding for large repositories. Despite improvements in…
Software developers frequently issue generic natural language queries for code search while using code search engines (e.g., GitHub native search, Krugle). Such queries often do not lead to any relevant results due to vocabulary mismatch…
The objective of this research was to find out how the two search engines Google and Bing perform when users work freely on pre-defined tasks, and judge the relevance of the results immediately after finishing their search session. In a…
COTS-based development is a component reuse approach promising to reduce costs and risks, and ensure higher quality. The growing availability of COTS components on the Web has concretized the possibility of achieving these objectives. In…
There is a growing demand for transparency in search engines to understand how search results are curated and to enhance users' trust. Prior research has introduced search result explanations with a focus on how to explain, assuming…
Developers spend a significant amount of time searching for code: e.g., to understand how to complete, correct, or adapt their own code for a new context. Unfortunately, the state of the art in code search has not evolved much beyond text…
Dedicated software search engines that index open source software repositories or in-house software assets significantly enhance the chance of finding software components suitable for reuse. However, they still leave the work of evaluating…
Source code search plays an important role in software development, e.g. for exploratory development or opportunistic reuse of existing code from a code base. Often, exploration of different implementations with the same functionality is…
Purpose: To compare five major Web search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, and Seekport) for their retrieval effectiveness, taking into account not only the results but also the results descriptions. Design/Methodology/Approach: The…
Search engine retrieval effectiveness studies are usually small-scale, using only limited query samples. Furthermore, queries are selected by the researchers. We address these issues by taking a random representative sample of 1,000…