Source Code Curation on StackOverflow: The Vesperin System

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed the rise of software question and answer sites like StackOverflow, where developers can pose detailed coding questions and receive quality answers. Developers using these sites engage in a complex code foraging process of understanding and adapting the code snippets they encounter. We introduce the notion of source code curation to cover the act of discovering some source code of interest, cleaning and transforming (refining) it, and then presenting it in a meaningful and organized way. In this paper, we present Vesperin, a source code curation system geared towards curating Java code examples on StackOverflow.