Source code examples are valuable to developers needing to use an unfamiliar application programming interface (API). Numerous approaches exist to help developers locate source code examples; while some of these help the developer to select the most promising examples, none help the developer to reuse the example itself. Without explicit tool support for the complete end-to-end task, the developer can waste time and energy on examples that ultimately fail to be appropriate; as a result, the overhead required to reuse an example can restrict a developer's willingness to investigate multiple examples to find the "best" one for their situation. This paper outlines four case studies involving the end-to-end use of source code examples: we investigate the overhead and pitfalls involved in combining a few state-of-the-art techniques to support the end-to-end use of source code examples.

Developers perform small-scale reuse tasks to save time and to increase the quality of their code, but due to their small scale, the costs of such tasks can quickly outweigh their benefits. Existing approaches focus on locating source code for reuse but do not support the integration of the located code within the developer's system, thereby leaving the developer with the burden of performing integration manually. This paper presents an approach that uses the developer's context to help integrate the reused source code into the developer's own source code. The approach approximates a theoretical framework (higher-order anti-unification modulo theories), known to be undecidable in general, to determine candidate correspondences between the source code to be reused and the developer's current (incomplete) system. This approach has been implemented in a prototype tool, called Jigsaw, that identifies and evaluates candidate correspondences greedily with respect to the highest similarity. Situations involving multiple candidate correspondences with similarities above a defined threshold are presented to the developer for resolution. Two empirical evaluations were conducted: an experiment comparing the quality of Jigsaw's results against suspected cases of small-scale reuse in an industrial system; and case studies with two industrial developers to consider its practical usefulness and usability issues.

Generalization tasks are important for continual improvement to the design of an evolving code base, eliminating redundancy where it has accumulated. An important step in generalization is identifying the detailed structural correspondence between two pieces of code being considered for generalization. Unfortunately, tool support for this step is insufficient, leaving the developer to resort to tedious and error-prone manual determination of correspondence. This paper presents an approach for automatically determining correspondences as an early step in a generalization task. The approach is implemented in a proof-of-concept plug-in to the Eclipse integrated development environment. Two small empirical evaluations of the tool have been conducted: a comparison between human attempts to determine detailed correspondences and those of the tool; and, a comparison of the use of the tool to the use of diff/CCFinder in performing generalization tasks.