Code maintenance data sets typically consist of a before and after version of the code that contains the improvement or fix. Such data sets are important for software engineering support tools related to code maintenance, such as program repair, code recommender systems, or Application Programming Interface (API) misuse detection. Most of the current data sets are constructed from mining commit history in version-control systems or issues in issue-tracking systems.
In this paper, we investigate whether Stack Overflow can be used as an additional data source. Comments on Stack Overflow provide an effective way for developers to point out problems with existing answers, alternative solutions, or pitfalls. In this paper, we mine comment-edit pairs from Stack Overflow and investigate their potential usefulness. These pairs have the added benefit of having concrete descriptions of why the change is needed as well as potentially having less tangled changes to deal with. We first design a technique to extract related comment-edit pairs and then investigate the nature of these pairs. We find that the majority of comment-edit pairs are not tangled, but only 27% of the studied pairs are potentially useful for the above applications. We categorize the types of mined pairs and find that the highest ratio of useful pairs come from categories Correction, Obsolete, Flaw, and Extension. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our extracted pairs, we submitted 15 pull requests on GitHub, 10 of which have been accepted to widely used repositories such as Apache Beam and nltk. Our work is the first to investigate Stack Overflow comment-edit pairs and opens the door for future work in this direction. Based on our findings and observations, we provide concrete suggestions on how to potentially identify a larger set of useful comment-edit pairs, which can also be facilitated by our shared data.
Background: Sub-optimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers may write low-quality code due to many reasons, such as lack of technical knowledge, lack of experience, time pressure, management decisions, and even unhappiness. Once sub-optimal code is unknowingly (or knowingly) integrated into the codebase of software systems, its accumulation may lead to large maintenance costs and technical debt. Stack Overflow is a popular website for programmers to ask questions and share their code snippets. The crowdsourced and collaborative nature of Stack Overflow has created a large source …
The content quality of shared knowledge in Stack Overflow (SO) is crucial in supporting software developers with their programming problems. Thus, SO allows its users to suggest edits to improve the quality of a post (i.e., question and answer). However, existing research shows that many suggested edits in SO are rejected due to undesired contents/formats or violating edit guidelines. Such a scenario frustrates or demotivates users who would like to conduct good-quality edits. Therefore, our research focuses on assisting SO users by offering them suggestions on how to improve their editing of …
To improve software engineering, software repositories have been mined for code snippets and bug fixes. Typically, this mining takes place at the level of files or commits. To be able to dig deeper and to extract insights at a higher resolution, we hereby present an annotated dataset that contains over 7 million edits of code and text on Stack Overflow. Our preliminary study indicates that these edits might be a treasure trove for mining information about fine-grained patches, e.g., for the optimisation of non-functional properties.
While having options could be liberating, too many options could lead to the sub-optimal solution being chosen. This is not an exception in the software engineering domain. Nowadays, API has become imperative in making software developers' life easier. APIs help developers implement a function faster and more efficiently. However, given the large number of open-source libraries to choose from, choosing the right APIs is not a simple task. Previous studies on API recommendation leverage natural language (query) to identify which API would be suitable for the given task. However, these studies o…
Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers to seek programming-related information. More and more developers use Community Question and Answer forums, such as Stack Overflow, to search for code examples of how to accomplish a certain coding task. This is often considered to be more efficient than working from source documentation, tutorials or full worked examples. However, due to the complexity of these online Question and Answer forums and the very large volume of information they contain, developers can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of available information. This makes…
Stack Overflow is often viewed as the most influential Software Question Answer (SQA) website with millions of programming-related questions and answers. Tags play a critical role in efficiently structuring the contents in Stack Overflow and are vital to support a range of site operations, e.g., querying relevant contents. Poorly selected tags often introduce extra noise and redundancy, which leads to tag synonym and tag explosion problems. Thus, an automated tag recommendation technique that can accurately recommend high-quality tags is desired to alleviate the problems mentioned above. Inspi…
Recently, automatic code comment generation is proposed to facilitate program comprehension. Existing code comment generation techniques focus on describing the functionality of the source code. However, there are other aspects such as insights about quality or issues of the code, which are overlooked by earlier approaches. In this paper, we describe a mining approach that recommends insightful comments about the quality, deficiencies or scopes for further improvement of the source code. First, we conduct an exploratory study that motivates crowdsourced knowledge from Stack Overflow discussion…
Software engineering is knowledge-intensive and requires software developers to continually search for knowledge, often on community question answering platforms such as Stack Overflow. Such information sharing platforms do not exist in isolation, and part of the evidence that they exist in a broader software documentation ecosystem is the common presence of hyperlinks to other documentation resources found in forum posts. With the goal of helping to improve the information diffusion between Stack Overflow and other documentation resources, we conducted a study to answer the question of how an…
Stack Overflow is one of the most popular technical Q&A sites used by software developers. Seeking help from Stack Overflow has become an essential part of software developers' daily work for solving programming-related questions. Although the Stack Overflow community has provided quality assurance guidelines to help users write better questions, we observed that a significant number of questions submitted to Stack Overflow are of low quality. In this paper, we introduce a new web-based tool, Code2Que, which can help developers in writing higher quality questions for a given code snippet. Code…
Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of code snippets and free-form text on a wide variety of topics. Like other software artifacts, questions and answers on SO evolve over time, for example when bugs in code snippets are fixed, code is updated to work with a more recent library version, or text surrounding a code snippet is edited for clarity. To be able to analyze how content on SO evolves, we built SOTorrent, an open dataset based on the official SO data dump. SOTorrent provides access to the version history of…
Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of code snippets and free-form text on a wide variety of topics. Like other software artifacts, questions and answers on SO evolve over time, for example when bugs in code snippets are fixed, code is updated to work with a more recent library version, or text surrounding a code snippet is edited for clarity. To be able to analyze how content on SO evolves, we built SOTorrent, an open dataset based on the official SO data dump. SOTorrent provides access to the version history of…
Using online Q&A forums, such as Stack Overflow (SO), for guidance to resolve program bugs, among other development issues, is commonplace in modern software development practice. Runtime exceptions (RE) is one such important class of bugs that is actively discussed on SO. In this work we present a technique and prototype tool called MAESTRO that can automatically recommend an SO post that is most relevant to a given Java RE in a developer's code. MAESTRO compares the exception-generating program scenario in the developer's code with that discussed in an SO post and returns the post with the c…
Software developers often reuse code from online sources such as Stack Overflow within their projects. However, the process of searching for code snippets and integrating them within existing source code can be tedious. In order to improve efficiency and reduce time spent on code reuse, we present an automated code reuse tool for the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Developer Environment), NLP2TestableCode. NLP2TestableCode can not only search for Java code snippets using natural language tasks, but also evaluate code snippets based on a user's existing code, modify snippets to improve fit and correct …
Despite the unarguable importance of Stack Overflow (SO) for the daily work of many software developers and despite existing knowledge about the impact of code duplication on software maintainability, the prevalence and implications of code clones on SO have not yet received the attention they deserve. In this paper, we motivate why studies on code duplication within SO are needed and how existing studies on code reuse differ from this new research direction. We present similarities and differences between code clones in general and code clones on SO and point to open questions that need to be…
With the increase in acceptance of open source platforms for knowledge sharing, Question and Answer (Q\&A) websites such as Stack Overflow have become increasingly popular in the programming domain. Many novice programmers visit Stack Overflow for reasons that include posing questions, finding answers for issues they come across in the process of programming. Practitioners voluntarily answer questions on Stack Overflow based on their experience or prior knowledge. Most of these answers are also accompanied by comments from users of Stack Overflow. Questions, answers and comments on Stack Overf…
Stack Overflow hosts valuable programming-related knowledge with 11,926,354 links that reference to the third-party websites. The links that reference to the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow websites extend the Stack Overflow knowledge base substantially. However, with the rapid development of programming-related knowledge, many resources hosted on the Internet are not available anymore. Based on our analysis of the Stack Overflow data that was released on Jun. 2, 2019, 14.2% of the links on Stack Overflow are broken links. The broken links on Stack Overflow can obstruct viewers fro…
A growing number of software-intensive systems are being accused of violating or ignoring human values (e.g., privacy, inclusion, and social responsibility), and this poses great difficulties to individuals and society. Such violations often occur due to the solutions employed and decisions made by developers of such systems that are misaligned with user values. Stack Overflow is the most popular QA website among developers to share their issues, solutions (e.g., code snippets), and decisions during software development. We conducted an exploratory study to investigate the occurrence of human …
Context: There is a growing demand for information on how IT companies look for candidates to their open positions. Objective: This paper investigates which hard and soft skills are more required in IT companies by analyzing the description of 20,000 job opportunities. Method: We applied open card sorting to perform a high-level analysis on which types of hard skills are more requested. Further, we manually analyzed the most mentioned soft skills. Results: Programming languages are the most demanded hard skills. Communication, collaboration, and problem-solving are the most demanded soft skill…
Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers as a popular way to seek programming-related information from peers via the internet. The Stack Overflow community recommends users to provide the related code snippet when they are creating a question to help others better understand it and offer their help. Previous studies have shown that} a significant number of these questions are of low-quality and not attractive to other potential experts in Stack Overflow. These poorly asked questions are less likely to receive useful answers and hinder the overall knowledge generation and sha…
Stack Overflow has accumulated millions of answers. Informative comments can strengthen their associated answers (e.g., providing additional information). Currently, Stack Overflow hides comments that are ranked beyond the top 5. Stack Overflow aims to display more informative comments (i.e., the ones with higher scores) and hide less informative ones using this mechanism. As a result, 4.4 million comments are hidden under their answer threads. Therefore, it is very important to understand how well the current comment hiding mechanism works. In this study, we investigate whether the mechanism …
An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the appropriate refactoring strategy is not always straightforward, resulting in developers seeking assistance. Although research in refactoring is well-established, with several studies altering between the detection of refactoring opportunities and the recommendation of appropriate code changes, little is known about their adoption in practice. Analyzing the percepti…
Runtime Exceptions (REs) are an important class of bugs that occur frequently during code development. Traditional Automatic Program Repair (APR) tools are of limited use in this "in-development" use case, since they require a test-suite to be available as a patching oracle. Thus, developers typically tend to manually resolve their in-development REs, often by referring to technical forums, such as Stack Overflow (SO). To automate this manual process we extend our previous work, MAESTRO, to provide real-time assistance to developers for repairing Java REs by recommending a relevant patch-sugge…
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Microsoft（微软）；Uber（优步）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Apple（苹果公司）
Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) provide tool support to automate many source code editing tasks. Traditionally, IDEs use only the spatial context, i.e., the location where the developer is editing, to generate candidate edit recommendations. However, spatial context alone is often not sufficient to confidently predict the developer's next edit, and thus IDEs generate many suggestions at a location. Therefore, IDEs generally do not actively offer suggestions and instead, the developer is usually required to click on a specific icon or menu and then select from a large list of potenti…
Static analysis tools, or linters, detect violation of source code conventions to maintain project readability. Those tools automatically fix specific violations while developers edit the source code. However, existing tools are designed for the general conventions of programming languages. These tools do not check the project/API-specific conventions. We propose a novel static analysis tool DevReplay that generates code change patterns by mining the code change history, and we recommend changes using the matched patterns. Using DevReplay, developers can automatically detect and fix project/AP…
Norms are behavioral expectations in communities. Online communities are also expected to abide by the rules and regulations that are expressed in the code of conduct of a system. Even though community authorities continuously prompt their users to follow the regulations, it is observed that hate speech and abusive language usage are on the rise. In this paper, we quantify and analyze the patterns of violations of normative behaviour among the users of Stack Overflow (SO) - a well-known technical question-answer site for professionals and enthusiast programmers, while posting a comment. Even t…
Software developers frequently reuse source code from repositories as it saves development time and effort. Code clones accumulated in these repositories hence represent often repeated functionalities and are candidates for reuse in an exploratory or rapid development. In previous work, we introduced DeepClone, a deep neural network model trained by fine tuning GPT-2 model over the BigCloneBench dataset to predict code clone methods. The probabilistic nature of DeepClone output generation can lead to syntax and logic errors that requires manual editing of the output for final reuse. In this pa…
Although many software development projects have moved their developer discussion forums to generic platforms such as Stack Overflow, Eclipse has been steadfast in hosting their self-supported community forums. While recent studies show forums share similarities to generic communication channels, it is unknown how project-specific forums are utilized. In this paper, we analyze 832,058 forum threads and their linkages to four systems with 2,170 connected contributors to understand the participation, content and sentiment. Results show that Seniors are the most active participants to respond bug…
JavaScript (JS) is one of the most popular programming languages due to its flexibility and versatility, but maintaining JS code is tedious and error-prone. In our research, we conducted an empirical study to characterize the relationship between co-changed software entities (e.g., functions and variables), and built a machine learning (ML)-based approach to recommend additional entity to edit given developers' code changes. Specifically, we first crawled 14,747 commits in 10 open-source projects; for each commit, we created one or more change dependency graphs (CDGs) to model the referencer-r…
