Related papers: Evaluating How Developers Use General-Purpose Web-…
Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…
Search Engine has become a major tool for searching any information from the World Wide Web (WWW). While searching the huge digital library available in the WWW, every effort is made to retrieve the most relevant results. But in WWW…
It is widely known that people become better at an activity if they perform this activity long and often. Yet, the question is whether being active in related areas like communicating online, writing blog articles or commenting on community…
Traditional code search engines often do not perform well with natural language queries since they mostly apply keyword matching. These engines thus need carefully designed queries containing information about programming APIs for code…
Since programming concepts do not match their syntactic representations, code search is a very tedious task. For instance in Java or C, array doesn't match [], so using "array" as a query, one cannot find what they are looking for. Often…
Geographic location search engines allow users to constrain and order search results in an intuitive manner by focusing a query on a particular geographic region. Geographic search technology, also called location search, has recently…
The advent of LLMs has given rise to a new type of web search: Generative search, where LLMs retrieve web pages related to a query and generate a single, coherent text as a response. This output modality stands in stark contrast to…
In software development, the identification of source code file experts is an important task. Identifying these experts helps to improve software maintenance and evolution activities, such as developing new features, code reviews, and bug…
Search engines could consistently favor certain values over the others, which is considered as biased due to the built-in infrastructures. Many studies have been dedicated to detect, control, and mitigate the impacts of the biases from the…
The packaging model of Android apps requires the entire code necessary for the execution of an app to be shipped into one single apk file. Thus, an analysis of Android apps often visits code which is not part of the functionality delivered…
In today's software world with its cornucopia of reusable software libraries, when a programmer is faced with a programming task that they suspect can be completed through the use of a library, they often look for code examples using a…
This paper investigates the composition of search engine results pages. We define what elements the most popular web search engines use on their results pages (e.g., organic results, advertisements, shortcuts) and to which degree they are…
The transition from analogue to digital archives and the recent explosion of online content offers researchers novel ways of engaging with data. The crucial question for ensuring a balance between the supply and demand-side of data, is…
This paper critically audits the search endpoint of YouTube's Data API (v3), a common tool for academic research. Through systematic weekly searches over six months using eleven queries, we identify major limitations regarding completeness,…
Code completion has become a common practice for programmers during their daily programming activities. It aims at automatically predicting the next tokens or lines that the programmers tend to use. A good code completion tool can…
Code reuse is an important part of software development. The adoption of code reuse practices is especially common among Node.js developers. The Node.js package manager, NPM, indexes over 1 Million packages and developers often seek out…
The goal of this working paper is to summarize the main empirical evidences provided by the scientific community as regards the comparison between the two main citation based academic search engines: Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic…
Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…
The software engineering community recently has witnessed widespread deployment of AI programming assistants, such as GitHub Copilot. However, in practice, developers do not accept AI programming assistants' initial suggestions at a high…
General purpose Search Engines (SEs) crawl all domains (e.g., Sports, News, Entertainment) of the Web, but sometimes the informational need of a query is restricted to a particular domain (e.g., Medical). We leverage the work of SEs as part…