Exploiting code search engines to improve programmer productivity

Code Search Engines (CSE) can serve as powerful resources of open source code, as they can search in billions of lines of open source code available on the web. The strength of CSEs can be used for several tasks like searching relevant code samples, identifying hotspots, and finding bugs. However, the major limitations in using CSEs for these tasks are that the returned samples are too many and they are often partial. Our framework addresses the preceding limitations and thereby helps in using CSEs for these tasks. We showed the effectiveness of our framework with two tools developed based on our framework.