10 Years Later: Revisiting How Developers Search for Code

Code search is an integral part of a developer’s workflow. In 2015, researchers published a paper reflecting on the code search practices at Google of 27 developers who used the internal Code Search tool. That paper had first-hand accounts for why those developers were using code search and highlighted how often and in what situations developers were searching for code. In the past decade, much has changed in the landscape of developer support. New languages have emerged, artificial intelligence (AI) for code generation has gained traction, auto-complete in the IDE has gotten better, Q&A forums have increased in popularity, and code repositories are larger than ever. It is worth considering whether those observations from almost a decade ago have stood the test of time. In this work, inspired by the prior survey about the Code Search tool, we run a series of three surveys with 1,945 total responses and report overall Code Search usage statistics for over 100,000 users. Unlike the prior work, in our surveys, we include explicit success criteria to understand when code search is meeting their needs, and when it is not. We dive further into two common sub-categories of code search effort: when its users are looking for examples and when they are using code search alongside code review. We find that Code Search users continue to use the tool frequently and the frequency has not changed despite the introduction of AI-enhanced development support. Users continue to turn to Code Search to find examples, but the frequency of example-seeking behavior has decreased. More often than before, users access the tool to learn about and explore code. This has implications for future Code Search support in software development.