Chapter. Revealing the Polysemy in ‘Code Search on the Web’: Finding Components to Reuse and Snippets to Remix
Description
Empirical research and the character of tools for searching the Web for code both indicate that components and snippets are fundamentally different from each other. Components have well-defined boundaries, and examples include packages, libraries, and projects. Code in components tend to be downloaded and used as-is. Snippets are typically a few lines of code, and are usually found embedded in other artifacts, such as open source projects and web pages. Code in snippets is typically copied, pasted, and adapted. We review and analyze these findings to motivate the organization of subsequent sections of the book.
Authors
Susan Elliott Sim, University of California, Irvine
Rosalva Gallardo-Valencia, University of California, Irvine
Bio and Photo
Susan Elliott Sim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine. Her primary research area is empirical software engineering, with particular attention to program comprehension, source code searching on the web, research methodology, and software process for small companies.
Rosalva Gallardo-Valencia is a PhD Candidate at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine under the supervision of Professor Susan Sim. Rosalva conducts empirical studies on software engineering, specifically on source code search on the Web and Agile methodologies. She has six years of experience developing applications for telecommunication and financial organizations.
