FSE 2025
Mon 23 - Fri 27 June 2025 Trondheim, Norway
co-located with ISSTA 2025
Mon 23 Jun 2025 14:00 - 14:20 at Aurora A - Code Search Chair(s): Xin Xia

Code search is an integral part of a developer’s workflow. In 2015, researchers published a paper reflecting on the code search practices of 27 developers. That paper had first-hand accounts for why those developers were using code search, and highlighted how often and in what situations developers were searching for code. In the past decade, much has changed in the landscape of developer support. New languages have emerged, AI for code generation has gained traction, auto-complete in the IDE has gotten better, Q&A forums have increased in popularity, and code repositories are larger than ever. It is worth considering whether those observations from almost a decade ago have stood the test of time.

In this work, we replicate and expand on the prior survey with over 1,200 developers, and report code search usage statistics for over 100,000 tool users. Unlike the prior work, in our surveys, we include explicit success criteria to understand when code search is meeting their needs, and when it is not. We dive further into two common sub-categories of code search effort: when developers are looking for examples, and when they are using code search alongside code review. We find that developers continue to use code search frequently, and the frequency has not changed despite the introduction of AI-enhanced development support. Developers continue to use code search to find examples, but the frequency of example-seeking behavior has decreased. More often than before, developers are using code search to learn about and explore code. This has implications for future code search support in software development.

Mon 23 Jun

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

14:00 - 15:30
Code SearchResearch Papers / Journal First / Ideas, Visions and Reflections at Aurora A
Chair(s): Xin Xia Zhejiang University
14:00
20m
Talk
10 years later: revisiting how developers search for code
Research Papers
Kathryn Stolee North Carolina State University, Tobias Welp Google, Caitlin Sadowski , Sebastian Elbaum University of Virginia
DOI
14:20
20m
Talk
Approaching Code Search for Python as a Translation Retrieval Problem with Dual Encoders
Journal First
Monoshiz Mahbub Khan Rochester Institute of Technology, Zhe Yu Rochester Institute of Technology
14:40
20m
Talk
Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Code Search without Fine-Tuning
Research Papers
Keyu Liang Zhejiang University, Zhongxin Liu Zhejiang University, Chao Liu Chongqing University, Zhiyuan Wan Zhejiang University, David Lo Singapore Management University, Xiaohu Yang Zhejiang University
DOI
15:00
10m
Talk
Measuring What Matters: An Aggregate Metric for Assessing Enterprise Code Summaries
Ideas, Visions and Reflections
Ashita Saxena IBM Research, Palanivel Kodeswaran IBM Research India, Sayandeep Sen IBM Research India, Srikanth Tamilselvam IBM Research
15:10
20m
Talk
MiSum: Multi-Modality Heterogeneous Code Graph Learning for Multi-Intent Binary Code Summarization
Research Papers
Kangchen Zhu National university of Defense Technology, Zhiliang Tian National University of Defense Technology, Shangwen Wang National University of Defense Technology, Weiguo Chen National University of Defense Technology, Zixuan Dong National University of Defense Technology, mingyue leng National University of Defense Technology, Xiaoguang Mao National University of Defense Technology
DOI

Information for Participants
Mon 23 Jun 2025 14:00 - 15:30 at Aurora A - Code Search Chair(s): Xin Xia
Info for room Aurora A:

Aurora A is the first room in the Aurora wing.

When facing the main Cosmos Hall, access to the Aurora wing is on the right, close to the side entrance of the hotel.

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