On code reuse from StackOverflow: An exploratory study on Android apps

Cited by 90 publications

(66 citation statements)

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“…Work similar to ours are studies by An et al [3], Abdalkareem et al [1], Baltes et al [4], and Zhang et al [83]. An et al investigated clones between 399 Android apps and Stack Overflow posts.…”

Section: Related Worksupporting

confidence: 70%

“…Stack Overflow is a popular online programming community with 7.6 million users, 14 million questions, and 23 million answers 1 . It allows programmers to ask questions and give answers to programming problems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This also happens within the context of online Q&A websites such as Stack Overflow. An et al [3] showed 1. Data as of 21 August 2017 from https://stackexchange.com/sites that 1,279 cloned snippets between Android apps and Stack Overflow potentially violate software licenses.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We call code snippets that are copied from software systems to online Q&A websites (such as Stack Overflow) and vice versa as "online code clones." There are two directions in creating online code clones: (1) code is cloned from a software project to a Q&A website as an example; or (2) code is cloned from a Q&A website to a software project to obtain a functionality, perform a particular task, or fixing a bug. Similar to classic code clones, i.e., clones between software systems, online code clones can lead to license violations, bug propagation, an introduction of vulnerabilities, and re-use of outdated code.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Toxic Code Snippets on Stack Overflow

Ragkhitwetsagul

Krinke

Paixao

et al. 2021

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Online code clones are code fragments that are copied from software projects or online sources to Stack Overflow as examples. Due to an absence of a checking mechanism after the code has been copied to Stack Overflow, they can become toxic code snippets, e.g., they suffer from being outdated or violating the original software license. We present a study of online code clones on Stack Overflow and their toxicity by incorporating two developer surveys and a large-scale code clone detection. A survey of 201 high-reputation Stack Overflow answerers (33% response rate) showed that 131 participants (65%) have ever been notified of outdated code and 26 of them (20%) rarely or never fix the code. 138 answerers (69%) never check for licensing conflicts between their copied code snippets and Stack Overflow's CC BY-SA 3.0. A survey of 87 Stack Overflow visitors shows that they experienced several issues from Stack Overflow answers: mismatched solutions, outdated solutions, incorrect solutions, and buggy code. 85% of them are not aware of CC BY-SA 3.0 license enforced by Stack Overflow, and 66% never check for license conflicts when reusing code snippets. Our clone detection found online clone pairs between 72,365 Java code snippets on Stack Overflow and 111 open source projects in the curated Qualitas corpus. We analysed 2,289 non-trivial online clone candidates. Our investigation revealed strong evidence that 153 clones have been copied from a Qualitas project to Stack Overflow. We found 100 of them (66%) to be outdated, of which 10 were buggy and harmful for reuse. Furthermore, we found 214 code snippets that could potentially violate the license of their original software and appear 7,112 times in 2,427 GitHub projects.We performed an empirical study of online code clones between Stack Overflow and 111 Java open source projects 8. https://ucl-crest.github.io/cloverflow-web This is the author's version of an article that has been published in this journal. Changes were made to this version by the publisher prior to publication.The final version of record is available at http://dx.

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Section: Related Worksupporting

confidence: 70%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Toxic Code Snippets on Stack Overflow

Ragkhitwetsagul

Krinke

Paixao

et al. 2021

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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“…(Bearman, 1987). The range of purposes for software creation and use include: to validate research results (Hwang, Fish, Soito, Smith, & Kellogg, 2017), to investigate and fix source code bugs (Abdalkareem, Shihab, & Rilling, 2017), and to increase efficiency (Banker & Kauffman, 1991). In ideal cases, conversations can be conducted with resource creators to gather crucial information about the intended purpose and functionality of the software.…”

Section: Identifying Curation Dimensionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Curation as “Interoperability With the Future”: Preserving Scholarly Research Software in Academic Libraries

Chassanoff

Altman

2019

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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This article considers the problem of preserving research software within the wider realm of digital curation, academic research libraries, and the scholarly record. We conducted a pilot study to understand the ecosystem in which research software participates, and to identify significant characteristics that have high potential to support future scholarly practices. A set of topical curation dimensions were derived from the extant literature and applied to select cases of institutionally significant research software. This approach yields our main contribution, a curation model and decision framework for preserving research software as a scholarly object. The results of our study highlight the unique characteristics and challenges at play in building curation services in academic research libraries.

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