With the advent of large code repositories and sophisticated search capabilities, code
search is increasingly becoming a key software development activity. In this work we shed …

Data scientists are responsible for the analysis decisions they make, but it is hard for them to
track the process by which they achieved a result. Even when data scientists keep logs, it is …

Many theories of human debugging rely on complex mental constructs that offer little
practical advice to builders of software engineering tools. Although hypotheses are …

A reachability question is a search across feasible paths through a program for target
statements matching search criteria. In three separate studies, we found that reachability …

Many software reuse tasks involve reusing source code that was not designed in a manner
conducive to those tasks, requiring that ad hoc modifications be applied. Such pragmatic …

Theories of human behavior are an important but largely untapped resource for software
engineering research. They facilitate understanding of human developers' needs and …

How users think, behave, and make decisions when interacting with information retrieval
(IR) systems is a fundamental research problem in the area of Interactive IR. There is …

Despite decades of research into how professional programmers debug, only recently has
work emerged about how end-user programmers attempt to debug programs. Without this …

One of the least studied areas of Information Foraging Theory is diet: the information
foragers choose to seek. For example, do foragers choose solely based on cost, or do they …

Foraging among too many variants of the same artifact can be problematic when many of
these variants are similar. This situation, which is largely overlooked in the literature, is …