How Developers Search for Code: A Case Study
Citation: Caitlin Sadowski, Kathryn T. Stolee, Sebastian Elbaum (2015) How Developers Search for Code: A Case Study.
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): How Developers Search for Code: A Case Study
Download: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/43835.pdf
Tagged: google (RSS)
Summary
"characterization of how developers at Google search for code, obtained through a combination of survey (396 responses) and search log-analysis (tens of thousands of records) generated by 27 developers during a period of 2 weeks"
Findings, corresponding to 5 research questions:
- code search used to answer range of questions, including what code does, where it is used, why it behaves as it does, who is responsible, when code changed, and how to perform a task
- used to navigate even through code developers know well
- 1/3 of searches incrementally performed through query reformulation; most scoped to a subset of the code repository.
- developers average 12 queries per weekday, median 6; more common than previous literature indicated
- use varies among contexts eg search results more likely to be clicked on in code review sessions
Theoretical and Practical Relevance
"Understanding how developers interact with code search is crucial to drive the next generation of techniques and tools to support searching, and future software development environments and workflows."
