Publication Type

Book Chapter

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2014

Abstract

The open source community, as well as numerous technical blogs and community web sites, put online vast quantities of free source code, ranging from snippets to full-blown products. This code embodies the software development community’s domain knowledge, and mirrors the structure of the Internet: it is distributed rather than hierarchical; it is chaotic, incomplete, and inconsistent. StackOverflow.com is a Question and Answer (Q&A) website which uses social media to facilitate knowledge exchange between programmers by mitigating the pitfalls involved in using code from the Internet. Its design nurtures a community of developers, and enables crowd sourced software engineering activities ranging from documentation to providing useful, high quality code snippets to be used in production. In this chapter we review Stack Overflow from three perspectives: (1) its design and its social media characteristics, (2) the role it plays in the software documentation landscape, and (3) the use of Stack Overflow in the context of the example centric programming paradigm.

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Finding source code on the web for remix and reuse

Volume

9781461465966

Editor

SIM, Susan Elliott; GALLARDO-VALENCIA, Rosalva E.

First Page

289

Last Page

308

ISBN

9781461465959

Identifier

10.1007/978-1-4614-6596-6_15

Publisher

Springer

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6596-6_15

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