The promise of search-driven development is that developers will save time and resources by reusing external code in their local projects. To efficiently integrate this code, users must be able to trust it, thus trustability of code search results is just as important as their relevance. In this paper, we introduce a trustability metric to help users assess the quality of code search results and therefore ease the cost-benefit analysis they undertake trying to find suitable integration candidates. The proposed trustability metric incorporates both user votes and cross-project activity of developers to calculate a "karma" value for each developer. Through the karma value of all its developers a project is ranked on a trustability scale. We present JBender , a proof-of-concept code search engine which implements our trustability metric and we discuss preliminary results from an evaluation of the prototype.
Search is a fundamental activity in software development. However, to search source code efficiently, it is not sufficient to implement a traditional full text search over a base of source code, human factors have to be taken into account as well.We looked into ways of increasing the search results code trustability by providing and analysing a range of meta data alongside the actual search results. RESEARCH PROBLEM AND MOTIVATIONOne of the major problems of code search engines (CSE) concerns the trustability of search results. When trying to achieve effient levels of software reuse, the effort to implement the reused software must be minimized. This automatically eliminates the solution of the user just reading through the source code, trying to understand it, and making sure it does actually acomplish what it is supposed to. We need ways of ensuring code trustability for minimal costs. Let us consider an example:Using a CSE Luke has found some results matching his specifications. He would now like to use the found source code in his project -but he does not know under which license the found code was published, and whether it is still maintained. Luke tries to contact the original author but cannot find any name nor can he figure out from which original project the code snippet was taken. Luke gets frustrated and decides to implement the code on his own.The portrayed situation may be exaggerated but it captures one of the problems of code search. The higher the trust the user has in the search results, i.e. the more he knows about them, the more likely he is to reuse the code.Human trustability factors are, for example, which developers worked on a project, and what other projects they worked for. Social trustability factors are, for example, how well people (developers, users, ...) like certain projects, and how renowned the developers are who worked for them.Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. ICSE '10, May 2-8 2010, Cape Town, South Africa Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-60558-719-6/10/05 ...$10.00.We are suggesting a solution comprising different answers to sub problems of the overall code search topic. We created a base of meta data linked to our source code repository to provide this information to users. Trough this, trustability of results is increased. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORKSearching for reusable source code is a fundamental activity for developers.[1] Based on this finding the field of source code search showed an increased activity over the last years which resulted in the CSEs available today. However, to support search-driven development it is not sufficient to implement a full text search over a base of source code, human ...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.