Concepts

Motivation

“Have a look at this piece of code that I’m writing–I’m sure it has been written before. I wouldn’t be surprised to find it verbatim somewhere on GitHub.” - @kr1

Every piece of functionality in a software project requires code that lies somewhere in the wide reusability spectrum that goes form extremely custom and strongly tied to the specific implementation to completely generic and highly reusable.

On the custom side of the spectrum there is all the code that defines the features of the software and all the choices of its implementation. That one is code that need to be written.

On the other hand seasoned software developers are trained to spot pieces of functionality that lie far enough on the generic side of the range that with high probability are already implemented in a librariy or a framework and that are documented well enough to be discovered with a keyword-based search, e.g. on StackOverflow and Google.

In between the two extremes there is a huge gray area populated by pieces of functionality that are not generic enough to obviously deserve a place in a library, but are common enough that must have been already implemented by someone else for their software. This kind of code is doomed to be re-implemented again and again for the simple reason that there is no way to search code by functionality...

Or is it?

Test-driven code reuse

Test-driven reuse (TDR) is an extension of the well known test-driven development (TDD) development practice.

Developing a new feature in TDR starts with the developer writing the tests that will validate the correct implementation of the desired functionality.

Before writing any functional code the tests are run against all functions and classes of all available projects.

Any code passing the tests is presented to the developer as a candidate implementation for the target feature:

  • if nothing passes the tests the developer need to implement the feature and TDR reduces to TDD
  • if any code passes the tests the developer can:
    • import: accept code as a dependency and use the class / function directly
    • fork: copy the code and the related tests into their project
    • study: use the code and the related tests as guidelines for their implementation, in particular identifyng corner cases and optimizations

Unit tests validation

An independent use case for test-driven code search is unit tests validation. If a test passes with an unexpected object there are two possibilities, either the test is not strict enough and allows for false positives and needs to be updated, or the PASSED is actually a function you could use instead of your implementation.

Bibliography

  • “CodeGenie: a tool for test-driven source code search”, O.A. Lazzarini Lemos et al, Companion to the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems and applications companion, 917–918, 2007, ACM, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1297846.1297944
  • “Code conjurer: Pulling reusable software out of thin air”, O. Hummel et al, IEEE Software, (25) 5 45-52, 2008, IEEE, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MS.2008.110PDF
  • “Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse”, S.E. Sim et al, 251, 2013PDF
  • “Test-Driven Reuse: Improving the Selection of Semantically Relevant Code”, M. Nurolahzade, Ph.D. thesis, 2014, UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY — PDF