Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

11-2022

Abstract

Stack Overflow (SO) provides informal documentation for APIs in response to questions that express API related developer needs. Navigating the information available on SO and getting information related to a particular API and need is challenging due to the vast amount of questions and answers and the tag-driven structure of SO. In this paper we focus on identifying and classifying fine-grained developer needs expressed in sentences of API-related SO questions, as well as the specific information types used to express such needs, and the different roles APIs play in these questions and their answers. We derive a taxonomy, complementing existing ones, through an empirical study of 266 SO posts. We then develop and evaluate an approach for the automated identification of the fine-grained developer needs in SO threads, which takes a thread as input and outputs the corresponding developer needs, the types of information expressing them, and the roles of API elements relevant to the needs. To show a practical application of our taxonomy, we introduce and evaluate an approach for the automated retrieval of SO questions, based on these developer needs.

Keywords

Developer Information Need, API, Stack Overflow

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Volume

48

Issue

11

First Page

4485

Last Page

4500

ISSN

0098-5589

Identifier

10.1109/TSE.2021.3120203

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3120203

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