Detecting and Characterizing Developer Behavior Following Opportunistic Reuse of Code Snippets from the Web

Modern software development is social and relies on many online resources and tools. In this paper, we study opportunistic code reuse from the Web, e.g. when developers copy code snippets from popular Q&A sites and paste them into their projects. Our focus is the behavior of developers following opportunistic code reuse, which reveals the success or failure of the action. We study developer behavior via a large, representative dataset of micro-interactions in the IDE. Our analysis of developer behavior exhibited in this dataset confirms laboratory study observations that code reuse from the Web is followed by heavy editing, in some cases by a rapid undo, and rarely by the execution of tests.