Brittany Reid

Yusuf Sulistyo Nugroho, Farah Danisha Salam, Brittany Reid et al.

Documenting code snippets is essential to pinpoint key areas where both developers and users should pay attention. Examples include usage examples and other Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which are especially important for third-party libraries. With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), the key goal is to investigate the kinds of description developers commonly use and evaluate how well an LLM, in this case Llama, can support description generation. We use NPM Code Snippets, consisting of 185,412 packages with 1,024,579 code snippets. From there, we use 400 code snippets (and their descriptions) as samples. First, our manual classification found that the majority of original descriptions (55.5%) highlight example-based usage. This finding emphasizes the importance of clear documentation, as some descriptions lacked sufficient detail to convey intent. Second, the LLM correctly identified the majority of original descriptions as "Example" (79.75%), which is identical to our manual finding, showing a propensity for generalization. Third, compared to the originals, the produced description had an average similarity score of 0.7173, suggesting relevance but room for improvement. Scores below 0.9 indicate some irrelevance. Our results show that depending on the task of the code snippet, the intention of the document may differ from being instructions for usage, installations, or descriptive learning examples for any user of a library.

Brittany Reid, Markus Wagner, Marcelo d'Amorim et al.

Online participant recruitment platforms such as Prolific have been gaining popularity in research, as they enable researchers to easily access large pools of participants. However, participant quality can be an issue; participants may give incorrect information to gain access to more studies, adding unwanted noise to results. This paper details our experience recruiting participants from Prolific for a user study requiring programming skills in Node.js, with the aim of helping other researchers conduct similar studies. We explore a method of recruiting programmer participants using prescreening validation, attention checks and a series of programming knowledge questions. We received 680 responses, and determined that 55 met the criteria to be invited to our user study. We ultimately conducted user study sessions via video calls with 10 participants. We conclude this paper with a series of recommendations for researchers.

Bodin Chinthanet, Brittany Reid, Christoph Treude et al.

The Node.js Package Manager (i.e., npm) archive repository serves as a critical part of the JavaScript community and helps support one of the largest developer ecosystems in the world. However, as a developer, selecting an appropriate npm package to use or contribute to can be difficult. To understand what features users and contributors consider important when searching for a good npm package, we conduct a survey asking Node.js developers to evaluate the importance of 30 features derived from existing work, including GitHub activity, software usability, and properties of the repository and documentation. We identify that both user and contributor perspectives share similar views on which features they use to assess package quality. We then extract the 30 features from 104,364 npm packages and analyse the correlations between them, including three software features that measure package ``runnability"; ability to install, build, and execute a unit test. We identify which features are negatively correlated with runnability-related features and find that predicting the runnability of packages is viable. Our study lays the groundwork for future work on understanding how users and contributors select appropriate npm packages.

Brittany Reid, Marcelo d`Amorim, Markus Wagner et al.

Code reuse is an important part of software development. The adoption of code reuse practices is especially common among Node.js developers. The Node.js package manager, NPM, indexes over 1 Million packages and developers often seek out packages to solve programming tasks. Due to the vast number of packages, selecting the right package is difficult and time consuming. With the goal of improving productivity of developers that heavily reuse code through third-party packages, we present Node Code Query (NCQ), a Read-Eval-Print-Loop environment that allows developers to 1) search for NPM packages using natural language queries, 2) search for code snippets related to those packages, 3) automatically correct errors in these code snippets, 4) quickly setup new environments for testing those snippets, and 5) transition between search and editing modes. In two user studies with a total of 20 participants, we find that participants begin programming faster and conclude tasks faster with NCQ than with baseline approaches, and that they like, among other features, the search for code snippets and packages. Our results suggest that NCQ makes Node.js developers more efficient in reusing code.

Brittany Reid, Christoph Treude, Markus Wagner

Software developers often reuse code from online sources such as Stack Overflow within their projects. However, the process of searching for code snippets and integrating them within existing source code can be tedious. In order to improve efficiency and reduce time spent on code reuse, we present an automated code reuse tool for the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Developer Environment), NLP2TestableCode. NLP2TestableCode can not only search for Java code snippets using natural language tasks, but also evaluate code snippets based on a user's existing code, modify snippets to improve fit and correct errors, before presenting the user with the best snippet, all without leaving the editor. NLP2TestableCode also includes functionality to automatically generate customisable test cases and suggest argument and return types, in order to further evaluate code snippets. In evaluation, NLP2TestableCode was capable of finding compilable code snippets for 82.9% of tasks, and testable code snippets for 42.9%.