A Controlled Experiment on the Process Used by Developers During Internet-Scale Code Search - Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse - page 76

Our study represents initial work on this topic. Further study is needed to better
understand some of the effects that we found. For instance, we were skeptical of
one result, the effect of intention on query revision. We were surprised that more
queries were needed to find reference examples than code to reuse as-is. This may
be an artifact of our experiment design, but we do not yet have the data to give a
definitive answer. To our knowledge, there have been no observational field studies
of developers as they search for source code as part of their daily work. Such a study
would be a helpful complement to the experiment reported on here and would aid
in validating and expanding the results.
Acknowledgements This material is based upon work supported by the NSF under Grant No. IIS-
0846034. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material
are those of the authors and do not necessary reflect the views of the NSF.
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