Understanding the impact of support for iteration on code search

Sometimes, when programmers use a search engine they know more or less what they need. Other times, programmers use the search engine to look around and generate possible ideas for the programming problem they are working on. The key insight we explore in this paper is that the results found in the latter case tend to serve as inspiration or triggers for the next queries issued. We introduce two search engines, CodeExchange and CodeLikeThis, both of which are specifically designed to enable the user to directly leverage the results in formulating the next query. CodeExchange does this with a set of four features supporting the programmer to use characteristics of the results to find other code with or without those characteristics. CodeLikeThis supports simply selecting an entire result to find code that is analogous, to some degree, to that result. We evaluated how these approaches were used along with two approaches not explicitly supporting iteration, a baseline and Google, in a user study among 24 developers. We find that search engines that support using results to form the next query can improve the programmers’ search experience and different approaches to iteration can provide better experiences depending on the task.