Reuse of variants in online repositories: Foraging for the fittest

Programming is a creative task and is generally exploratory in nature. Often, end-user programmers (non-professional) indulge in opportunistically creating their programs. To facilitate learning and reuse of code, most end-user programming environments provides online repositories. While the provision of programs in repositories helps support end-user programming to an extent, finding and reusing an appropriate program variant is a challenging task. In this paper, we explore the reuse behavior of end-user programmers using Information Foraging Theory. We conducted an empirical study of eight end-user programmers, qualitatively analyzed their information-seeking behavior while reusing program variants, and report new cue types and strategies specific to end-user programmers.