Code you can use: Searching for web automation scripts based on reusability

Abstract

Web scripting enables users to automate interactions with websites. Online open source repositories provide scripts available for reuse. Yet just because these scripts are open source does not mean they are all reusable: many are specialized and irrelevant to most peoples' needs, while others are hard to understand or learn from. Repositories offer keyword-based search engines to find scripts relevant to specialized needs, but they lack any means for filtering search results according to reusability. To address this shortcoming, we present an approach for creating a model to automatically estimate the reusability of web automation scripts. To test this approach, we prototyped a search engine that uses these reusability estimates to sort one particular kind of web automation scripts, CoScripter macros, according to reusability. An empirical evaluation confirmed that the system's reusability estimates are significantly correlated with user perceptions of macro reusability, thus implying that our approach presents a viable means for helping end-user programmers to find reusable web automation scripts.