Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

2-2020

Abstract

Stack Overflow (SO) has become an essential resource for software development. Despite its success and prevalence, navigating SO remains a challenge. Ideally, SO users could benefit from highlighted navigational cues that help them decide if an answer is relevant to their task and context. Such navigational cues could be in the form of essential sentences that help the searcher decide whether they want to read the answer or skip over it. In this paper, we compare four potential approaches for identifying essential sentences. We adopt two existing approaches and develop two new approaches based on the idea that contextual information in a sentence (e.g., “if using windows”) could help identify essential sentences. We compare the four techniques using a survey of 43 participants. Our participants indicate that it is not always easy to figure out what the best solution for their specific problem is, given the options, and that they would indeed like to easily spot contextual information that may narrow down the search. Our quantitative comparison of the techniques shows that there is no single technique sufficient for identifying essential sentences that can serve as navigational cues, while our qualitative analysis shows that participants valued explanations and specific conditions, and did not value filler sentences or speculations. Our work sheds light on the importance of navigational cues, and our findings can be used to guide future research to find the best combination of techniques to identify such cues.

Keywords

Codes, Navigation, Conferences, Search problems, Software, Task analysis

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE 27th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER), London, ON, Canada, February 18-21

First Page

229

Last Page

239

ISBN

9781728151434

Identifier

10.1109/SANER48275.2020.9054828

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER48275.2020.9054828

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