TY - GEN
T1 - How Fast and Effectively Can Code Change History Enrich Stack Overflow
AU - Nishinaka, Ryujiro
AU - Ubayashi, Naoyasu
AU - Kamei, Yasutaka
AU - Sato, Ryosuke
N1 - Funding Information:
As the next step, we plan to study whether or not information other than source code left by developers can enrich SO articles. Code change history contains not only source code but also natural language information such as discussions in commit messages and issue tracking systems. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 18H04097.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 IEEE.
PY - 2020/12
Y1 - 2020/12
N2 - Stack Overflow (SO) is one of the most popular QA sites for not only providing valuable information to software developers but also encouraging the sharing of knowledge and problem solving. Unfortunately, the information provided by SO is not always sufficient for developers. In this paper, we empirically show how fast and effectively historical code changes can substitute for missing or unanswered SO articles. Developers in all around the world encounter many problems daily and their trial-And-error experiences to resolve the problems are accumulated in the code change history. The extracted source code differences are expected to provide valuable information to developers before the questions and answers are posted on SO. In our study, we focus on the usage of APIs as the topic of SO articles, because many developers are interested in API programming and suffer from the problems related to API usage. We extracted 4, 780 code differences from 713 repositories of Android applications (F-Droid). As a result, we found that 64% of SO articles on Android APIs are related to code differences, whereas 44% of code differences are related to SO articles. Not a few code differences appear before the corresponding SO articles are actually posted. The median of time lag between the first appearance of code changes and the first actual SO postings is 22 months.
AB - Stack Overflow (SO) is one of the most popular QA sites for not only providing valuable information to software developers but also encouraging the sharing of knowledge and problem solving. Unfortunately, the information provided by SO is not always sufficient for developers. In this paper, we empirically show how fast and effectively historical code changes can substitute for missing or unanswered SO articles. Developers in all around the world encounter many problems daily and their trial-And-error experiences to resolve the problems are accumulated in the code change history. The extracted source code differences are expected to provide valuable information to developers before the questions and answers are posted on SO. In our study, we focus on the usage of APIs as the topic of SO articles, because many developers are interested in API programming and suffer from the problems related to API usage. We extracted 4, 780 code differences from 713 repositories of Android applications (F-Droid). As a result, we found that 64% of SO articles on Android APIs are related to code differences, whereas 44% of code differences are related to SO articles. Not a few code differences appear before the corresponding SO articles are actually posted. The median of time lag between the first appearance of code changes and the first actual SO postings is 22 months.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85099286848&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85099286848&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/QRS51102.2020.00066
DO - 10.1109/QRS51102.2020.00066
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85099286848
T3 - Proceedings - 2020 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security, QRS 2020
SP - 467
EP - 478
BT - Proceedings - 2020 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security, QRS 2020
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security, QRS 2020
Y2 - 11 December 2020 through 14 December 2020
ER -