Spotting Familiar Code Snippet Structures for Program Comprehension

Developers deal with the persistent problem of understanding non-trivial code snippets. To understand the given implementation, its issues, and available choices, developers will bene fit from reading relevant discussions and descriptions over the web. However, there is no easy way to know the relevant natural language terms so as to reach to such descriptions from a code snippet, especially if the documentation is inadequate and if the vocabulary used in the code is not helpful for web search. We propose an approach to solve this problem using a repository of topics and associated structurally variant snippets collected from a discussion forum. In this on-going work, we take Java methods from the code samples of three Java books, match them with the repository, and associate the topics with 76.9% precision and 66.7% recall.