Understanding the impact of support for iteration on code search

Martie, Lee; Hoek, André van der; Kwak, Thomas Minsoo

doi:10.1145/3106237.3106293

Cited by 23 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 106 publications

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“…The evaluation of 346 jars from Eclipse framework shows that SSI-based schemes are preferred over baseline schemes that do not include usage similarity in the search. Martie et al (2017) reflect that code search is an iterative process where information seekers need to keep adapting their search queries until they find relevant results. They present two tools,CodeLikeThis (CLT) and CodeExchange (CE), to facilitate iterative code search and perform a user study to show that the tools could improve code search experience.…”

Section: Code Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Siamese: scalable and incremental code clone search via multiple code representations

Ragkhitwetsagul

Krinke

2019

Empir Software Eng

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This paper presents a novel code clone search technique that is accurate, incremental, and scalable to hundreds of million lines of code. Our technique incorporates multiple code representations (i.e., a technique to transform code into various representations to capture different types of clones), query reduction (i.e., a technique to select clone search keywords based on their uniqueness), and a customised ranking function (i.e., a technique to allow a specific clone type to be ranked on top of the search results) to improve clone search performance. We implemented the technique in a clone search tool, called Siamese, and evaluated its search accuracy and scalability on three established clone data sets. Siamese offers the highest mean average precision of 95% and 99% on two clone benchmarks compared to seven state-of-the-art clone detection tools, and reported the largest number of Type-3 clones compared to three other code search engines. Siamese is scalable and can return cloned code snippets within 8 seconds for a code corpus of 365 million lines of code. Using an index of 130,719 GitHub projects, we demonstrate that Siamese's incremental indexing capability dramatically decreases the index preparation time for large-scale data sets with multiple releases of software projects. The paper discusses the applications of Siamese to facilitate software development and research with two use cases including online code clone detection and clone search with automated license analysis.

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Section: Code Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Siamese: scalable and incremental code clone search via multiple code representations

Ragkhitwetsagul

Krinke

2019

Empir Software Eng

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“…There is substantial evidence in the literature to support the premise that developers use general purpose search engines during software development (e.g., [16,22,31,36,39]). Sim et al [31] conducted a comparison study on various code search techniques of developers and observed that the general-purpose engine work better to find reference examples than do dedicated code search tools.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite their limitations, GPSEs are the most popular choice for code search and will continue to be like that, in all likelihood, because they are lightweight, easy to use, and have sophisticated web interfaces [22]. Thus, it is worthwhile to evaluate how GPSEs perform while used for code vs. general non-code related search so that we can better understand GPSE's shortcomings in code domain and tune them accordingly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating how developers use general-purpose web-search for code retrieval

Rahman

Barson

Paul

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

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Search is an integral part of a software development process. Developers often use search engines to look for information during development, including reusable code snippets, API understanding, and reference examples. Developers tend to prefer generalpurpose search engines like Google, which are often not optimized for code related documents and use search strategies and ranking techniques that are more optimized for generic, non-code related information.In this paper, we explore whether a general purpose search engine like Google is an optimal choice for code-related searches. In particular, we investigate whether the performance of searching with Google varies for code vs. non-code related searches. To analyze this, we collect search logs from 310 developers that contains nearly 150,000 search queries from Google and the associated result clicks. To differentiate between code-related searches and non-code-related searches, we build a model which identifies the code intent of queries. Leveraging this model, we build an automatic classifier that detects a code and non-code related query. We confirm the effectiveness of the classifier on manually annotated queries where the classifier achieves a precision of 87%, a recall of 86%, and an F1-score of 87%. We apply this classifier to automatically annotate all the queries in the dataset. Analyzing this dataset, we observe that code related searching often requires more effort (e.g., time, result clicks, and query modifications) than general noncode search, which indicates code search performance with a general search engine is less effective. ACM Reference format:

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“…Source code examples or code fragments can help developers understand how others addressed the similar problems (Ko et al, 2006;Xie and Pei, 2006;MP, 2009;Bajracharya and Lopes, 2012;Martie et al, 2017;Xia et al, 2017) and can serve as a basis for writing new programs (Johnson, 1992;Kim et al, 2010;Buse and Weimer, 2012). These code examples can accelerate the development process (Mandelin et al, 2005) and increase the product quality (Marri et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clone-Seeker: Effective Code Clone Search Using Annotations

et al. 2022

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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 needed for tasks like automated software transplantation, software diversification, and software repair. Code clones, which are syntactically or semantically similar code fragments, are perfect candidates for such tasks. Searching for code clones involves a given search query to retrieve the relevant code fragments. We propose a novel approach called Clone-Seeker that focuses on utilizing clone class features in retrieving code clones. For this purpose, we generate metadata for each code clone in the form of a natural language document. The metadata includes a pre-processed list of identifiers from the code clones augmented with a list of keywords indicating the semantics of the code clone. This keyword list can be extracted from a manually annotated general description of the clone class, or automatically generated from the source code of the entire clone class. This approach helps developers to perform code clone search based on a search query written either as source code terms, or as natural language. With various experiments, we show that (1) Clone-Seeker is effective in finding clones from BigCloneBench dataset by applying code queries and natural language queries; 2) Clone-Seeker has a higher recall when searching for semantic code clones (i.e., Type-4) in BigCloneBench than the state-of-the-art; 3) Clone-Seeker is a generalized technique as it is effective in finding clones in Project CodeNet dataset by applying code queries and natural language queries. 4) Clone-Seeker with manual annotation outperforms other variants in finding clones on the basis of natural language queries.

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Understanding the impact of support for iteration on code search

Cited by 23 publications

References 106 publications

Siamese: scalable and incremental code clone search via multiple code representations

Siamese: scalable and incremental code clone search via multiple code representations

Evaluating how developers use general-purpose web-search for code retrieval

Clone-Seeker: Effective Code Clone Search Using Annotations

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