A Systematic Review of Automated Query Reformulations in Source Code Search

A Systematic Review of Automated Query Reformulations in Source Code Search
Mohammad Masudur Rahman and Chanchal K. Roy

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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 attempt 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, 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.

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Materials Included

• Grounded Theory contains all the artifacts produced by our Grounded Theory based qualitative analysis.
  • RQ1 : Open coding, axial coding, selective coding, and methodologies used by the primary studies. It answers RQ1.
  • RQ3 : Open coding, axial coding, selective coding, and challenges or issued faced by the primary studies. It answers RQ3.
• Systematic Literature Review contains all the artifacts produced by our systematic literature review (SLR)
  • SLR-Queries : The queries used to find candidate studies.
  • SLR-Selection : The intermediate steps and results towards finalizing 70 primary studies.
  • Research Questions : The six research questions answered by this work.
• RQ2 contains the artifacts related to RQ2.
• RQ4 contains the artifacts related to RQ4.
• RQ5 contains the artifacts related to RQ5.
• RQ6 contains the artifacts related to RQ6.
• LICENSE
• README

Cite our work

@ARTICLE{tosem2023masud,
	author={Rahman, M. M. and Roy, C. K.},
	journal={TOSEM},
	title={A Systematic Review of Automated Query Reformulations in Source Code Search},
	year={2023},
	pages={81}
}

Please contact Masud Rahman (masud.rahman@dal.ca) for details. If you benefit from this work, do not forget to add a star :)