Assessing the Evolution of Code Samples

To accelerate the learning process of technical resources by developers, code samples have been provided and maintained by organizations, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Code samples are special software projects made available in public repositories with the main goal of teaching developers how to use features of frameworks, libraries, or other technical resources. Since code samples are software projects themselves, they evolve over time. However, if their changes do not preserve essential characteristics such as size and simplicity during evolution, code samples may lose their purpose. In this work, we investigate how code samples evolve and how evolution may impact developers' doubts. We conduct an exploratory study on the evolution of 159 code samples provided by Android, AWS, Azure, and Spring Boot, assessing metrics related to size and complexity as well as questions asked by developers about these code samples in Stack Overflow. We observe that organizations may not be paying due attention to vital characteristics of code samples during their evolution. Our analysis also indicates that these changes may cause an upgrowth of developers' questions about code samples.