Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
11-2015
Abstract
Over the years of software development, a vast amount of source code has been accumulated. Many code search tools were proposed to help programmers reuse previously-written code by performing free-text queries over a large-scale codebase. Our experience shows that the accuracy of these code search tools are often unsatisfactory. One major reason is that existing tools lack of query understanding ability. In this paper, we propose CodeHow, a code search technique that can recognize potential APIs a user query refers to. Having understood the potentially relevant APIs, CodeHow expands the query with the APIs and performs code retrieval by applying the Extended Boolean model, which considers the impact of both text similarity and potential APIs on code search. We deploy the backend of CodeHow as a Microsoft Azure service and implement the front-end as a Visual Studio extension. We evaluate CodeHow on a large-scale codebase consisting of 26K C# projects downloaded from GitHub. The experimental results show that when the top 1 results are inspected, CodeHow achieves a precision score of 0.794 (i.e., 79.4% of the first returned results are relevant code snippets). The results also show that CodeHow outperforms conventional code search tools. Furthermore, we perform a controlled experiment and a survey of Microsoft developers. The results confirm the usefulness and effectiveness of CodeHow in programming practices.
Keywords
API understanding, Code search, Extended Boolean model, Software reuse
Discipline
Computer Sciences | Programming Languages and Compilers | Software Engineering
Publication
2015 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE: Lincoln, NE, November 9-13: Proceedings
First Page
260
Last Page
270
ISBN
9781509000258
Identifier
10.1109/ASE.2015.42
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Embargo Period
10-6-2019
Citation
LV, Fei; LOU, Jian-guang; WANG, Shaowei; ZHANG, Dongmei; and ZHAO, Jainjun.
CodeHow: Effective Code Search Based on API Understanding and Extended Boolean Model (E). (2015). 2015 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE: Lincoln, NE, November 9-13: Proceedings. 260-270.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4436
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2015.42