A Systematic Review of Automated Query Reformulations in Source Code Search

Author:

Rahman Mohammad Masudur1ORCID,Roy Chanchal K.2ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Dalhousie University, Canada

2. University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Abstract

Fixing software bugs and adding new features are two of the major maintenance tasks. Software bugs and features are reported as change requests. Developers consult these requests and often choose a few keywords from them as an ad hoc query. Then they execute the query with a search engine to find the exact locations within software code that need to be changed. Unfortunately, even experienced developers often fail to choose appropriate queries, which leads to costly trials and errors during a code search. Over the years, many studies have attempted to reformulate the ad hoc queries from developers to support them. In this systematic literature review, we carefully select 70 primary studies on query reformulations from 2,970 candidate studies, perform an in-depth qualitative analysis (e.g., Grounded Theory), and then answer seven research questions with major findings. First, to date, eight major methodologies (e.g., term weighting, term co-occurrence analysis, thesaurus lookup) have been adopted to reformulate queries. Second, the existing studies suffer from several major limitations (e.g., lack of generalizability, the vocabulary mismatch problem, subjective bias) that might prevent their wide adoption. Finally, we discuss the best practices and future opportunities to advance the state of research in search query reformulations.

Funder

Dalhousie University

International Dean’s Scholarship from University of Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan Innovation & Opportunity Scholarship

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Subject

Software

Reference218 articles.

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3. TechRepublic. 2017. Report: Software Failure Caused $1.7 Trillion in Financial Losses in 2017. Retrieved July 10 2023 from https://tek.io/2FBNl2i.

4. Reuters. 2018. Boeing Eyes Lion Air Crash Software Upgrade in 6 to 8 Weeks. Retrieved July 10 2023 from https://tinyurl.com/c3f2rsw3.

5. Medium. 2019. The 737Max and Why Software Engineers Might Want to Pay Attention. Retrieved July 10 2023 from https://bit.ly/2CmeTqB.

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