Authors
Caitlin Sadowski, Kathryn T Stolee, Sebastian Elbaum
Publication date
2015/8/30
Book
Proceedings of the 2015 10th joint meeting on foundations of software engineering
Pages
191-201
Description
With the advent of large code repositories and sophisticated search capabilities, code search is increasingly becoming a key software development activity. In this work we shed some light into how developers search for code through a case study performed at Google, using a combination of survey and log-analysis methodologies. Our study provides insights into what developers are doing and trying to learn when per- forming a search, search scope, query properties, and what a search session under different contexts usually entails. Our results indicate that programmers search for code very frequently, conducting an average of five search sessions with 12 total queries each workday. The search queries are often targeted at a particular code location and programmers are typically looking for code with which they are somewhat familiar. Further, programmers are generally seeking answers to questions about how …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
C Sadowski, KT Stolee, S Elbaum - Proceedings of the 2015 10th joint meeting on …, 2015