Characterizing Duplicate Code Snippets between Stack Overflow and Tutorials

Abstract

Developers are usually unaware of the quality and lineage of information available on popular Web resources, leading to potential maintenance problems and license violations when reusing code snippets from these resources. In this paper, we study the duplication of code snippets between two popular sources of software development information: the Stack Overflow Q a significant number (31%) of answers that contained a duplicate code block were chosen as the accepted answer. Qualitative analysis reveals that developers commonly use Stack Overflow to ask clarifying questions about code they reused from tutorials, and copy code snippets from tutorials to provide answers to questions.