Reuse of variants in online repositories: Foraging for the fittest.

Programming is a creative task and is generally exploratory in nature. Often, end-user programmers (non-professional) indulge in opportunistically creating their programs. To facilitate learning and reuse of code, most end-user programming environments provides online repositories. While the provision of programs in repositories helps support end-user programming to an extent, finding and reusing an appropriate program variant is a challenging task. In this paper, we explore the reuse behavior of end-user programmers using Information Foraging Theory. We conducted an empirical study of eight end user programmers, qualitatively analyzed their information seeking behavior while reusing program variants, and report new cue types and strategies specific to end-user programmers.