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The promise of recommender systems is to provide intelligent support to developers during their programming tasks. Such support ranges from suggesting program entities to taking into account pertinent Q&A pages. However, current recommender systems limit the context analysis to change history and developers' activities in the IDE, without considering what a developer has already consulted or perused,...
Online resources of formal and informal documentation–such as reference manuals, forum discussions and tutorials–have become an asset to software developers, as they allow them to tackle problems and to learn about new tools, libraries, and technologies. This study investigates to what extent and for which purpose developers refer to external online resources when they contribute changes to a repository...
Code redundancy widely occurs in software projects. Researchers have investigated the existence, causes, and impacts of code redundancy, showing that it can be put to good use, for example in the context of code completion. When analyzing source code redundancy, previous studies considered software projects as sequences of tokens, neglecting the role of the syntactic structures enforced by programming...
When knowledgeable colleagues are not available, developers resort to offline and online resources, e.g., tutorials, mailing lists, and Q&A websites. These, however, need to be found, read, and understood, which takes its toll in terms of time and mental energy. A more immediate and accessible resource are video tutorials found on the web, which in recent years have seen a steep increase in popularity...
Nowadays developers heavily rely on sources of informal documentation, including Q&A forums, slides, or video tutorials, the latter being particularly useful to provide introductory notions for a piece of technology. The current practice is that developers have to browse sources individually, which in the case of video tutorials is cumbersome, as they are lengthy and cannot be searched based on...
If measured by the number of published papers, defect prediction has become an important research field over the past decade, with many researchers continuously proposing novel approaches to predict defects in software systems. However, most of these approaches have had a noticeable lack of impact on industrial practice. This lack of impact is because something is intrinsically wrong in how defect...
Developers often require knowledge beyond the one they possess, which boils down to asking co-workers for help or consulting additional sources of information, such as Application Programming Interfaces (API) documentation, forums, and Q&A websites. However, it requires time and energy to formulate one’s problem, peruse and process the results. We propose a novel approach that, given a context...
Stack Overflow has become a fundamental resource for developers, becoming the de facto Question and Answer (Q&A) website, and one of the standard unstructured data sources for software engineering research to mine knowledge about development. We present SODA, the Stack Overflow Dataset Almanac, a tool that helps researchers and developers to better understand the trends of discussion topics in...
Stack Overflow is the de facto Question and Answer (Q&A) website for developers, and it has been used in many approaches by software engineering researchers to mine useful data. However, the contents of a Stack Overflow discussion are inherently heterogeneous, mixing natural language, source code, stack traces and configuration files in XML or JSON format. We constructed a full island grammar...
Summarization is hailed as a promising approach to reduce the amount of information that must be taken in by the person who wants to understand development artifacts, such as pieces of code, bug reports, emails, etc. However, existing approaches treat artifacts as pure textual entities, disregarding the heterogeneous and partially structured nature of most artifacts, which contain intertwined pieces...
Technical questions and answers (Q&A) services have become a valuable resource for developers. A prominent example of technical Q&A website is StackOverflow (SO), which relies on a growing community of more than two millions of users who actively contribute by asking questions and providing answers. To maintain the value of this resource, poor quality questions -- among the more than...
Stack Overflow is a popular questions and answers (Q&A) website among software developers. It counts more than two millions of users who actively contribute by asking and answering thousands of questions daily. Identifying and reviewing low quality posts preserves the quality of site's contents and it is crucial to maintain a good user experience. In Stack Overflow the identification of poor...
Developers often consult different sources of information like Application Programming Interfaces (API) documentation, forums, Q&A websites, etc. With the aim of gathering additional knowledge for the programming task at hand. The process of searching and identifying valuable pieces of information requires developers to spend time and energy in formulating the right queries, assessing the...
Services, such as Stack Overflow, offer a web platform to programmers for discussing technical issues, in form of Question and Answers (Q&A). Since Q&A services store the discussions, the generated “crowd knowledge” can be accessed and consumed by a large audience for a long time. Nevertheless, Q&A services are detached from the development environments used by programmers: Developers...
Question and Answer (Q&A) services, such as Stack Overflow, rely on a community of programmers who post questions, provide and rate answers, to create what is termed "crowd knowledge". As a consequence, these services archive voluminous and potentially useful information to help developers to solve programming-specific issues. Programmers tap into this crowd knowledge through web...
Developers often consult online tutorials and message boards to find solutions to their programming issues. Among the many online resources, Question & Answer websites are gaining popularity. This is no wonder if we consider a case like Stack Overflow, where more than 92% questions on expert topics are answered in a median time of 11 minutes. This new resource has scarcely been acknowledged by...
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