How the R community creates and curates knowledge: an extended study of stack overflow and mailing lists

Zagalsky, Alexey; Germán, Daniel M.; Storey, Margaret-Anne; Teshima, Carlos Gómez; Poo-Caamaño, Germán

doi:10.1007/s10664-017-9536-y

Cited by 37 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Recent studies within software engineering have looked at individual Stack Overflow channels, examining how knowledge is shared and formed within the R channel [26], and finding evidence for differences in use between this environment and other channels such as mailing lists [28]. Research looking at open-source discussion environments has established that social qualities of on-line interactions in technical fora are apparent [15] and can affect contributions made to open source projects [25].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An investigation of security conversations in stack overflow

López

Tun

Bandara

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Security Awareness From Design to Deployment

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Developers turn to Stack Overflow and other on-line sources to find solutions to security problems, but little is known about how they engage with and guide one another in these environments or the perceptions of software security this may encourage. This study joins recent calls to understand more about how developers use Internet sources to solve security problems. Using qualitative methods, a set of questions within the security channel of Stack Overflow were selected and examined for themes. Preliminary findings reveal more about this community of practitioners: who are the askers and commenters, how security questions are asked and how developers frame technical information using social and experience-based perceptions of security. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Software security engineering; • Software and its engineering → Collaboration in software development; KEYWORDS secure software development, collaborative environments, empirical studies 1 INTRODUCTION Many real-world security vulnerabilities in software relate to a few known classes of attack such as code injection. A number of practices and technologies for detecting and preventing vulnerabilities in software are likewise established, such as input sanitisation and non-escaping strings. However, it is not clear why many professional software developers do not adopt these practices and technologies as a matter of course. Security is, in part, a social phenomenon. Peer interaction, experience of security failures, and an awareness about the impact of security failures on people's well-being influence the decisions individuals make about whether or not to be secure in their personal lives [10] and on the job [17]. Social interaction is also key to developers' motivation to work; characteristics of the feedback received Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An investigation of security conversations in stack overflow

López

Tun

Bandara

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Security Awareness From Design to Deployment

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…They found that knowledge is constructed in each channel in a different manner: on Stack Overflow participants contribute knowledge independently of each other, whereas R-user mailing list are more likely to build on other answers. In this work, we create two datasets of Q&A related to Xamarin technology, that could be used for replicating some of these works (e.g., [46]).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, the question id 24598261 from Stack Overflow has an accepted answer based on a post from the Xamarin Forum (id: 66248). 36 Other papers have focused on combining different sources of information (e.g., [46,21,42,45,41]). However, to our knowledge, nobody has linked questions from two Q&A sites nor focused on Xamarin source of information.…”

Section: Combine Additional Sources Of Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two Datasets of Questions and Answers for Studying the Development of Cross-Platform Mobile Applications using Xamarin Framework

Martínez¹

2019

2019 IEEE/ACM 6th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Context:A cross-platform mobile application is an application that runs on multiple mobile platforms (Android, iOS). Several frameworks, have been proposed to simplify the development of cross-platform mobile applications and, therefore, to reduce development and maintenance costs. Between them, the cross-compiler mobile development frameworks, such as Xamarin from Microsoft, transform the application's code written in intermediate (aka nonnative) language to native code for each desired platform. However, to our best knowledge, there is no much research about the advantages and disadvantages of the use of those frameworks during the development and maintenance phases of mobile applications.Objective: The objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to present two datasets of questions and answers (Q&A) related to the development of mobile applications using Xamarin. Secondly, to show their usefulness, we present a replication study for discovering the main discussion topics of Xamarin development.Method: We created the two datasets by mining two Q&A sites: Xamarin Forum and Stack Overflow. Then, for discovering the main topics of the questions from both datasets, we replicated a study that applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Finally, we compared the discovered topics with those topics about general mobile development reported by a previous study.Results: Our datasets have 85,908 questions mined from the Xamarin Forum and 44,434 from Stack Overflow. Between the main topics discovered from those questions, we found that some of them are exclusively related to Xamarin and Microsoft technologies such as the design pattern 'MVVM'.Conclusions: Both datasets with Xamarin-related Q&A can be used by the research community for understanding the main concerns about developing cross-platform mobile applications using Xamarin framework. In this paper, we used it for replicating a studying about topic discovering.

show abstract

“…Developers can get badges from several activities, for instance, a developer can receive a badge if he/ she has asked a question that reached more than a thousand visits. Zagalsky et al (2016) identified that developers uses Stack Overflow for several reasons: (a) the ability to gain peer recognition; (b) its rich and user-friendly interface; (c) answers are straight to the point; (d) questions are usually answered faster than other forums; and (e) it is easy to search for previous questions and answers. categorize the mined questions and define a ranking algorithm to rank all the Stack Overflow questions based on their importance.…”

Section: Stack Overflowmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting governance of mobile application developers from mining and analyzing technical questions in stack overflow

Fontão

Ábia

Wiese

et al. 2018

J Softw Eng Res Dev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There is a need to improve the direct communication between large organizations that maintain mobile platforms (e.g. Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and third-party developers to solve technical questions that emerge during the project and development of developers' contributions in a Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO). In this context, those organizations may not know how to define and evolve strategies to govern their developers towards achieving their organizational goals. Such organizations use an infrastructure to support developers, for example, questions and answers (Q&A) portals such as Stack Overflow. Interactions among developers in these portals feed a Q&A repository that can serve as a mechanism to understand and define strategies to support developers. In this paper, we mined 1,568,377 technical questions from Stack Overflow related to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone platforms. Next, we performed comparisons among those MSECO regarding: (i) developers' activity intensity, (ii) hot-topics (using Latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm) from all and more commented/viewed questions, (iii) "What" and "How to" questions, (iv) hot-topics from more viewed unanswered questions, and (v) relationship among questions and official developer events. From the results, we identified four key insights: recruiting, educating, and monitoring strategies; barrier reduction; management of technology insertion; and fostering of relationships. The relevance of the four key insights to support developer governance was evaluated by practitioners through a survey. Finally, for each key insight we associated a total of 10 strategies to support developer governance activities. Such strategies were extracted from 65 studies identified through a systematic mapping of the literature. IntroductionIn Software Engineering, the relationship among mobile application developers and an organization responsible for a technological platform (keystone) which involves cooperation and competition has been investigated as a Software Ecosystem (SECO) (Bosch, 2009). In the mobile application (app) scenario, this context refers to a specific type of SECO, known as Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO) (Lin & Ye, 2009;Fontão et al., 2015). The developer is an essential actor to sustain MSECO contributions, such as apps and technical documentation (Fontão et al., 2016;Koch & Kerschbaum, 2014). Such contributions are usually stored in an official, internal MSECO repository, such as Android 1 and Apple 2 Developers repositories. Moreover, there are links between MSECO and external repositories, such as code (e.g. GitHub) (Casalnuovo et al., 2015) and questions and answers (Q&A) repositories. As an example of an external Q&A repository, Stack Overflow has a set of technical questions/answers that arise from the use of APIs, SDKs, and development tools (Ahmad et al., 2018). Such external repositories help to maintain the interaction among developers over a common platform, resulting in a set of contributions and influencing directly or indirectly the...

show abstract

How the R community creates and curates knowledge: an extended study of stack overflow and mailing lists

Cited by 37 publications

References 20 publications

An investigation of security conversations in stack overflow

An investigation of security conversations in stack overflow

Two Datasets of Questions and Answers for Studying the Development of Cross-Platform Mobile Applications using Xamarin Framework

Supporting governance of mobile application developers from mining and analyzing technical questions in stack overflow

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About