How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web? (NIER track)

Abstract

Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, use social media to facilitate knowledge exchange between programmers and fill archives with millions of entries that contribute to the body of knowledge in software development. Understanding the role of Q&A websites in the documentation landscape will enable us to make recommendations on how individuals and companies can leverage this knowledge effectively. In this paper, we analyze data from Stack Overflow to categorize the kinds of questions that are asked, and to explore which questions are answered well and which ones remain unanswered. Our preliminary findings indicate that Q&A websites are particularly effective at code reviews and conceptual questions. We pose research questions and suggest future work to explore the motivations of programmers that contribute to Q&A websites, and to understand the implications of turning Q&A exchanges into technical mini-blogs through the editing of questions and answers.

What makes a good code example?: A study of programming Q&A in StackOverflow

“…However, our findings have some overlaps with some other studies [13,23,27] which suggests that our results could be generalized to some extent. At least our findings can be used as hypotheses to be examined in later studies.…”

“…and that questions containing code are very common for review questions. Besides the question type, other factors, such as the question posting date and time, the identity of the questioner, the technology in the question, the length of the question, and the availability of code in the question affect receiving good answers [27]. The web can also provide alternative means of API documentation.…”

Crowdsourcing for agricultural applications: A review of uses and opportunities for a farmsourcing approach

“…Readers of 276 the forum can build their own knowledge about a specific topic by gathering the user-generated 277 information that is archived in the forum (passive use) or by contributing with questions and 278 answers (active use). In some fields of expertise such as computer programming, Q&A forums such 279 as www.stackoverflow.com have become a primary source of information that have rendered the 280 existing official software documentation obsolete (Treude et al, 2011). The wiki platforms are based 281 on a collaborative content-management system that allows to organise the user-generated content, 282 ultimately generating online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia.…”

An exploratory analysis of mobile development issues using stack overflow

“…All the documents were preprocessed using the following steps: (i) extract text from HTML content using the Java Swing HTML Parser 3 ; (ii) remove all non-white characters except letters and underscore; (iii) split identifiers using the camel case notation; (iv) remove common words 4 (i.e., stop-words); and (v) stem words using the Porter algorithm for English. For the splitting step we used the lang package in the Apache Commons project 5 version 3.3.1; and for the stop-words removal and stemming we used Apache Lucene Core 6 3.6.0.…”

“…In our analysis, we distinguished between questions with an accepted answer and questions with non-accepted answers, similarly to the work by Treude et al [4], which distinguished between successful and unsuccessful questions. The questions posted on SO can have accepted answers (i.e., answers that are verified and accepted by the question owner) or non-accepted answers (i.e., low-voted answers or unrelated ones, which were not validated by the question owner).…”