Squirrel: A Code Snippet Repository

Abstract

Teaching programming courses in an academic environment has challenges, particularly for undergraduate students. These challenges can also be found in the software industry, where novice developers still need to obtain coding training. In practice, lecturers or trainers always assign exercises to students with the goal of improving their coding skills. Based on teaching experience, we have found that students may need to rely on software development kits to code an application faster, such as reusing lines of code already developed (code snippets) to solve a particular problem. Additionally, to reduce the software development time, novice developers tend to use crowdsourcing and social media sources of example code that can be used to solve programming problems. Utilizing these code snippets not only saves time for students or novice developers but also helps them to learn. Therefore, we proposed a system, called Squirrel, that is capable of offline and online code snippet storage and searching. Additionally, for online functionalities, this application supports searching for code snippets that exist in question-and-answer websites, such as Stack Overflow. We believe that this system will help increase the effectiveness of software development, especially for computer-science students and novice developers.