Googling for Software Development: What Developers Search For and What They Find
Developers often search for software resources on the web. In practice, instead of going directly to websites (e.g., Stack Overflow), they rely on search engines (e.g., Google). Despite this being a common activity, we are not yet aware of what developers search from the perspective of popular software development websites and what search results are returned. With this knowledge, we can understand real-world queries, developers’ needs, and the query impact on the search results. In this paper, we provide an empirical study to understand what developers search on the web and what they find. We assess 1.3M queries to popular programming websites and we perform thousands of queries on Google to explore search results. We find that (i) developers’ queries typically start with keywords (e.g., Python, Android, etc.), are short (3 words), tend to omit functional words, and are similar among each other; (ii) minor changes to queries do not largely affect the Google search results, however, some cosmetic changes may have a non-negligible impact; and (iii) search results are dominated by Stack Overflow, but YouTube is also a relevant source nowadays. We conclude by presenting detailed implications for researchers and developers.
I am a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UFMG, Brazil. Research interests: software evolution, software repository mining, software quality, and empirical software engineering. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Lille / Inria, France. During three years, I was a Professor at FACOM/UFMS. Before, I was a Postdoctoral researcher at the ASERG/UFMG group. I was also a software developer at Inria, Lille, France and a research intern at Siemens, Erlangen, Germany.
Wed 19 MayDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
02:00 - 02:50 | |||
02:01 4mTalk | Automatic Part-of-Speech Tagging for Security Vulnerability Descriptions Technical Papers Sofonias Yitagesu Tianjin University, Xiaowang Zhang Tianjin University, Zhiyong Feng Tianjin University, Xiaohong Li TianJin University, Zhenchang Xing Australian National University Pre-print | ||
02:05 4mTalk | Attention-based model for predicting question relatedness on Stack Overflow Technical Papers Jiayan Pei South China University of Technology, Yimin Wu South China University of Technology, Research Institute of SCUT in Yangjiang, Zishan Qin South China University of Technology, Yao Cong South China University of Technology, Jingtao Guan Research Institute of SCUT in Yangjiang Pre-print | ||
02:09 4mTalk | Characterising the Knowledge about Primitive Variables in Java Code Comments Technical Papers Mahfouth Alghamdi The University of Adelaide, Shinpei Hayashi Tokyo Institute of Technology, Takashi Kobayashi Tokyo Institute of Technology, Christoph Treude University of Adelaide Pre-print | ||
02:13 4mTalk | Googling for Software Development: What Developers Search For and What They Find Technical Papers Andre Hora UFMG Pre-print | ||
02:17 3mTalk | Evaluating Pre-Trained Models for User Feedback Analysis in Software Engineering: A Study on Classification of App-Reviews Registered Reports Mohammad Abdul Hadi University of British Columbia, Fatemeh Hendijani Fard University of British Columbia Pre-print | ||
02:20 3mTalk | Cross-status Communication and Project Outcomes in OSS Development–A Language Style Matching Perspective Registered Reports Yisi Han Nanjing University, Zhendong Wang University of California, Irvine, Yang Feng State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Zhihong Zhao Nanjing Tech Unniversity, Yi Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Pre-print | ||
02:23 27mLive Q&A | Discussions and Q&A Technical Papers | ||
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