Investigating the potential of using worked examples to help resolve issues in a GitHub project

• WEs with high similarity guided developers to relevant directories and files. • Eye-tracking revealed the benefits and challenges of using WEs in OSS projects. • Data beyond the title and description is needed to obtain more relevant WEs. • WEs served as a starting point for resolving issues on GitHub. • WEs complement LLMs by offering community-validated solutions. The growing popularity of Open-Source Software projects has raised questions about the challenges novice and inexperienced developers face, especially on code contribution platforms like GitHub. This study investigates the effects of using Worked Examples (WEs) to support these developers in solving coding tasks, using eye-tracking and cognitive effort analysis. The research involved 20 undergraduate students analyzing issues from the JabRef repository, with recommendations of high and low-similarity examples provided by a bot. The findings suggest that highly similar WEs effectively guided participants by helping identify relevant directories, files, and code snippets, serving as starting points for task resolution. However, challenges emerged, such as difficulties locating useful information and risks of false proximity between seemingly similar issues. These results highlight the need for improved recommendation strategies beyond textual similarity, incorporating structural elements such as file and method names, while reducing cognitive load through better presentation of relevant information. This work lays the groundwork for exploring WEs in Open-Source Software projects and opens avenues for further research, including validating findings in other repositories and understanding behavioral patterns in using WEs.