Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

11-2022

Abstract

Developers often ask how-to questions using search engines, technical Q&A communities, and interactive Q&A systems to seek help for specific programming tasks. However, they often do not formulate the questions in a specific way, making it hard for the systems to return the best answers. We propose an approach (TaskKG4Q) that interactively helps developers formulate a programming related how-to question. TaskKG4Q is using a programming task knowledge graph (task KG in short) mined from Stack Overflow questions, which provides a hierarchical conceptual structure for tasks in terms of [actions], [objects], and [constraints]. An empirical evaluation of the intrinsic quality of the task KG revealed that 75.0% of the annotated questions in the task KG are correct. The comparison between TaskKG4Q and two baselines revealed that TaskKG4Q can help developers formulate more specific how-to questions. More so, an empirical study with novice programmers revealed that they write more effective questions for finding answers to their programming tasks on Stack Overflow.

Keywords

Programming Task, Query Formulation, Stack Overflow

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ESEC/FSE '22: Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Singapore, Singapore, November 14-18

First Page

306

Last Page

318

ISBN

9781450394130

Identifier

10.1145/3540250.3549160

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

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