Multistaging to understand: Distilling the essence of java code examples

Programmers commonly search the Web to find code examples that can help them solve a specific programming task. While some novice programmers may be willing to spend as much time as needed to understand a found code example, more experienced ones want to spend as little time as possible. They want to get a quick overview of the example's operation, so they can start working with it immediately. Getting this overview is often non-trivial and requires a tedious and manual inspection process. In this paper, we introduce a technique called Multi-staging to Understand, which streamlines this inspection process by distilling the essence of code examples. The essence of a code example conveys the most important aspects of the example's intended function. Our technique automatically decomposes the code in an example into code stages that can be explored non-sequentially; enabling fast exploratory learning. We discuss the key components of our technique and describe empirical results based on actual code examples on StackOverflow.