Activities performed by programmers while using framework examples as a guide

It is now a common approach pursued by programmers to develop new software systems using Object-Oriented Application Frameworks such as Spring, Struts and, Eclipse. This improves the quality and the maintainability of the code. Furthermore, it reduces development cost and time. However, the main problem is that these frameworks usually have a complicated Application Programming Interface (API), and typically suffer from the lack of enough documentation and appropriate user manuals. To solve these problems, programmers often refer to existing sample applications of those frameworks to learn how to implement the desired functionality in their own code. This is called the Monkey See, Monkey Do rule in software engineering literature. The aim of this paper is to investigate and analyze the activities programmers perform to achieve a successful use of this rule. The results of this analysis will help us to build automated tools which are helpful for programmers while perusing the aforementioned Monkey See, Monkey Do rule.