Explicit Code Reuse Recommendation

Code reuse is a common and recommended practice. However, to avoid code duplication reuse may require substantial refactoring effort, especially in legacy code with which the developer is not profoundly familiar. For this reason, developers often prefer to reimplement simple code fragments rather than properly reuse them. In this work, we describe the use of annotations to recommend a useful piece of code for subsequent reuse. These annotations then guard the code against changes that can complicate its extraction, thus allowing subsequent developers to easily locate and reuse it.