Remix: Snippets and Answers - Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse - page 249

Source code from the web can also be used as solutions to problems and answers
to questions. This style of reuse resembles the remix practices that have coalesced
around digital media. For example, music remixes involve taking bits from one or
more songs and recombining them into a new one. In this Part, there are three chap-
ters that examine this kind of source code retrieval.
In Chap. 14 “Software Problems that Motivate Web Searches,” Gallardo-Valencia
and Sim report on a field study of code retrieval in the wild. They were interested in
how software developers searched for code on the web to solve problems that they
encountered in their work.
Tantikul et al. write about lessons learned in Chap. 15 on “Novel and Applied
Algorithms in a Search Engine for Java Code Snippets.” Their prototype was pop-
ulated with pages from tutorial web sites, rather than open source components, and
the search engine returned snippets accompanied by short descriptions.
Software developers often use the question-and-answer site, StackOverflow.com,
when problem solving. They either find answers to their questions or post their
questions for others to answer. In Chap. 16 , Barzilay, Treude, and Zagalsky, report
on an empirical study of the kinds of questions that are asked and answered on Stack
Overflow, and they describe a tool that supports the remixing of examples from the
site.