An Analysis of user created source code sample usage

Abstract

Software development is a challenging task. Technologies change rapidly and engineers get new problems to solve often. Software engineering is a discipline where reusability can be used to simplify complexities and speedup development. Among the many different approaches of code reuse, sample source code plays a major role in speeding up the development process. With the growth of the internet, it became easier to publish and consume content via the World Wide Web including source code samples. This research statistically verifies using a hypothesis test the User Created Source Code Sample (UCSCS) usage level among Sri Lankan. Software Engineers. Additionally, qualitative analysis of how UCSCS are used by engineers with different levels of experience and different stages of a project delivery are also performed. The study showed that the usage level of UCSCS is generally high among engineers but varied significantly with the experience level and purpose of use.