Analyzing comment-induced updates on stack overflow

Abhishek Soni, Sarah Nadi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Stack Overflow is home to a large number of technical questions and answers. These answers also include comments from the community and other users about the answer's validity. Such comments may point to flaws in the posted answer or may indicate deprecated code that is no longer valid due to API changes. In this paper, we explore how comments affect answer updates on Stack Overflow, using the SOTorrent dataset. Our results show that a large number of answers on Stack Overflow are not updated, even when they receive comments that warrant an update. Our results can be used to build recommender systems that automatically identify answers that require updating, or even automatically update answers as needed.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2019
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages220-224
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781728134123
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2019
Event16th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: May 26 2019May 27 2019

Publication series

NameIEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Volume2019-May
ISSN (Print)2160-1852
ISSN (Electronic)2160-1860

Conference

Conference16th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period5/26/195/27/19

Keywords

  • Answer updates
  • APIs
  • Comments
  • Stack overflow

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software

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