Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

9-2017

Abstract

Code fragments posted in answers on Q&A forums can form an important source of developer knowledge. However, effective reuse of code fragments found online often requires information other than the code fragment alone. We report on the results of a survey-based study to investigate to what extent developers perceive Stack Overflow code fragments to be self-explanatory. As part of the study, we also investigated the types of information missing from fragments that were not self-explanatory. We find that less than half of the Stack Overflow code fragments in our sample are considered to be self-explanatory by the 321 participants who answered our survey, and that the main issues that negatively affect code fragment understandability include incomplete fragments, code quality, missing rationale, code organization, clutter, naming issues, and missing domain information. This study is a step towards understanding developers' information needs as they relate to code fragments, and how these needs can be addressed.

Keywords

Java, Organizations, Programming, Clutter, Software, Data collection

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Shanghai, China, 2017 September 17-22

First Page

509

Last Page

513

ISBN

9781538609927

Identifier

10.1109/ICSME.2017.24

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2017.24

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