Metadata-based code example embedding

In practice, developers usually seek different ways to save time and effort. Thus, they use different tools (such as search engines, issue tracking, or Q&A sites) to collaborate and find code examples that meet their specific needs. However, such tools only support the traditional find-alter-embed approach of code examples while ignoring the origin and location of these sources. Such information can be very useful to assist software development tasks such as bug-fixing, teamwork, and knowledge transfer, through direct notification of critical changes made to the code example, or access to the original source including its discussions, issues, and bug reports. In this paper, we propose a new approach that consists of collecting meta information about a code example to automatically track critical changes to it and its origin and provide feedback to both developers and the online community. We report on our vision, approach and challenges, and draft a software architecture to implement our research idea.

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