More archetypal usage scenarios for software search engines

Abstract

The increasing availability of software in all kinds of repositories has renewed interest in software retrieval and software reuse. Not only has there been significant progress in developing various types of tools for searching for reusable artifacts, but also the integration of these tools into development environments has matured considerably. Yet, relatively little is known on why and how developers use these features and whether there are applications of the technology that go beyond classic reuse. Since we believe it is important for our fledgling community to understand how developers can benefit from software search systems, we present an initial collection of archetypal usage scenarios for them. These are derived from a survey of existing literature along with novel ideas from ongoing experiments with a state of the art software search engine.