Scaling up evaluation of code search tools through developer usage metrics

Abstract

Code search is a fundamental part of program understanding and software maintenance and thus researchers have developed many techniques to improve its performance, such as corpora preprocessing and query reformulation. Unfortunately, to date, evaluations of code search techniques have largely been in lab settings, while scaling and transitioning to effective practical use demands more empirical feedback from the field. This paper addresses that need by studying metrics based on automatically-gathered anonymous field data from code searches to infer user satisfaction. We describe techniques for addressing important concerns, such as how privacy is retained and how the overhead on the interactive system is minimized. We perform controlled user and field studies which identify metrics that correlate with user satisfaction, enabling the future evaluation of search tools through anonymous usage data. In comparing our metrics to similar metrics used in Internet search we observe differences in the relationship of some of the metrics to user satisfaction. As we further explore the data, we also present a predictive multi-metric model that achieves accuracy of over 70% in determining query satisfaction.