Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

5-2022

Abstract

Stack Overflow has become an essential technical resource for developers. However, given the vast amount of knowledge available on Stack Overflow, finding the right information that is relevant for a given task is still challenging, especially when a developer is looking for a solution that applies to their specific requirements or technology stack. Clearly marking answers with their technical context, i.e., the information that characterizes the technologies and assumptions needed for this answer, is potentially one way to improve navigation. However, there is no information about how often such context is mentioned, and what kind of information it might offer. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to understand the occurrence of technical context in Stack Overflow answers and comments, using tags as a proxy for technical context. We specifically focus on additional context, where answers/comments mention information that is not already discussed in the question. Our results show that nearly half of our studied threads contain at least one additional context. We find that almost 50% of the additional context are either a library/framework, a programming language, a tool/application, an API, or a database. Overall, our findings show the promise of using additional context as navigational cues.

Keywords

contextual information, navigating information, Stack Overflow

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

MSR '22: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, , Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 2022 May 23-24

First Page

23

Last Page

34

ISBN

9781450393034

Identifier

10.1145/3524842.3528435

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3524842.3528435

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