Ethnographic Study of Copy and Paste Programming Practices in OOPL

When programmers develop and evolve software, they frequently copy and paste (C&P) code from an existing code base, or sources such as web pages or documentation. We believe that programmers follow a small number of well defined C&P usage patterns when they program, and understanding these patterns would enable us to design tools to improve the quality of software. We conducted an ethnographic study in order to understand programmers’ copy and paste programming practices. We observed 5 subjects programming in Java using an instrumented Eclipse IDE for about 50 coding hours and conducted interviews with them. In addition, we also observed 4 programmers directly for about 10 hours while they programmed. Based on these observations, we have built a taxonomy of copy and paste usage patterns. This paper presents our taxonomy of copy and paste usage patterns and discusses our insights with examples drawn from our observations. We propose a set of tools that both can reduce software maintenance problems incurred by C&P and can better support the intents of commonly used copy and paste scenarios.