Code Stories for Software Repurposing

Software reuse has the potential to save programmers time and effort through leveraging existing code. Today however, code reuse is typically limited to programmers reusing code that does exactly what they want to do, through APIs and modules. Research in analogical reasoning suggests that problem-solving can be enhanced by reusing logic from previously-solved, analogous problems. This type of problem-solving reuse in software is rare due to difficulties programmers face when understanding code. Specifically, programmers have difficulty understanding the intentions behind design choices of the original developer. I hypothesize that by being presented the story behind a piece of software's development, programmers will be better able to 1) understand the source code and 2) draw analogies between the source code's functionalities and those of their target code.