Stack Overflow in Github: Any Snippets There?
This addresses the problem of understanding code reuse practices for programmers and researchers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study analyzed 909k Python projects on GitHub and 1.9M Stack Overflow snippets to investigate how programmers use code snippets, finding quantitative and qualitative insights into literal copying versus adaptations.
When programmers look for how to achieve certain programming tasks, Stack Overflow is a popular destination in search engine results. Over the years, Stack Overflow has accumulated an impressive knowledge base of snippets of code that are amply documented. We are interested in studying how programmers use these snippets of code in their projects. Can we find Stack Overflow snippets in real projects? When snippets are used, is this copy literal or does it suffer adaptations? And are these adaptations specializations required by the idiosyncrasies of the target artifact, or are they motivated by specific requirements of the programmer? The large-scale study presented on this paper analyzes 909k non-fork Python projects hosted on Github, which contain 290M function definitions, and 1.9M Python snippets captured in Stack Overflow. Results are presented as quantitative analysis of block-level code cloning intra and inter Stack Overflow and GitHub, and as an analysis of programming behaviors through the qualitative analysis of our findings.