I want to use this! An analysis of the target audience of code samples.

  • Willian Braga Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul
  • Gabriel Menezes Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul
  • Awdren Fontão Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul
  • André Hora Federal University of Minas Gerais
  • Bruno Cafeo Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul

Abstract


Code samples are projects made available by organizations to assist the learning process of features of their products software. There is an increase in the importance that code samples have in the developer community, but little is known about who are using them. The target audience for code samples is believed to be the inexperienced developer, but to start a characterization, the current work presents an empirical study through the analysis of developer statistics on the Stack Overflow. As a result, implications have been generated that can assist organizations to keep code samples relevants to developers.
Keywords: Code Samples, Stack Overflow, Reputation, Mining Software Repositories, SECO

References

Amreen, S., Karnauch, A., and Mockus, A. (2019). Developer reputation estimator (dre). In 2019 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference ASE, pages 1082–1085. IEEE.

Bosch, J. (2009). From software product lines to software ecosystems. In SPLC, volume 9, pages 111–119.

Bosu, A., Corley, C. S., Heaton, D., Chatterji, D., Carver, J. C., and Kraft, N. A. (2013). Building reputation in stackoverflow: An empirical investigation. In 2013 10th Working Conference MSR, pages 89–92.

Fontão, A., Lima, F., Ábia, B., dos Santos, R. P., and Dias-Neto, A. C. (2017). Hearing the voice of developers in mobile software ecosystems. In Proceedings of the 31 st Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES’ 17, page 4–13, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.

Menezes, G., Cafeo, B., and Hora, A. (2019). Framework code samples: How are they maintained and used by developers? In 2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium ESEM, pages 1–11. IEEE.

Morrison, P. and Murphy-Hill, E. (2013). Is programming knowledge related to age? In Companion to the Working Conference MSR, pages 1–4. Citeseer.

Movshovitz-Attias, D., Movshovitz-Attias, Y., Steenkiste, P., and Faloutsos, C. (2013). Analysis of the reputation system and user contributions on a question answering website: Stackoverflow. In 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on ASONAM 2013, pages 886–893. IEEE.

Zhang, J., Jiang, H., Ren, Z., Zhang, T., and Huang, Z. (2019). Enriching api documentation with code samples and usage scenarios from crowd knowledge. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
Published
2020-10-19
BRAGA, Willian; MENEZES, Gabriel; FONTÃO, Awdren; HORA, André; CAFEO, Bruno. I want to use this! An analysis of the target audience of code samples.. In: WORKSHOP ON SOFTWARE VISUALIZATION, EVOLUTION AND MAINTENANCE (VEM), 8. , 2020, Evento Online. Anais [...]. Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação, 2020 . p. 33-40. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/vem.2020.14526.