Searching crowd knowledge to recommend solutions for API usage tasks

Campos, Eduardo Cunha; Souza, Lucas Batista Leite de; Maia, Marcelo de Almeida

doi:10.1002/smr.1800

Cited by 25 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 41 publications

(58 reference statements)

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“…Additionally, there could be more efficient ways to seek information about a specific problem as, for example, searching with Google, the Stack Overflow search engine, or even using recommendation approaches that use Stack Overflow data [40,41,24]. We advocate that due to its browsing nature, cookbooks can be complementary to searching mechanisms.…”

Section: Rq #5mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, in a searching process, a developer would be able to write a query, and a system would bring from Stack Overflow the best results for such query. Such searching process goes in the direction of automated on-demand developer documentation [23] with recommendation systems, and a system of this type using Stack Overflow content is presented in [24]. On the other hand, a crowd cookbook could, for instance, be used by someone who wants to know what are the main themes of an API, which is specially useful for newcomers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bootstrapping cookbooks for APIs from crowd knowledge on Stack Overflow

Souza

Campos

Madeiral

et al. 2019

Information and Software Technology

Self Cite

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Context: Well established libraries typically have API documentation. However, they frequently lack examples and explanations, possibly making difficult their effective reuse. Stack Overflow is a question-and-answer website oriented to issues related to software development. Despite the increasing adoption of Stack Overflow, the information related to a particular topic (e.g., an API) is spread across the website. Thus, Stack Overflow still lacks organization of the crowd knowledge available on it.Objective: Our target goal is to address the problem of the poor quality documentation for APIs by providing an alternative artifact to document them based on the crowd knowledge available on Stack Overflow, called crowd cookbook. A cookbook is a recipe-oriented book, and we refer to our cookbook as crowd cookbook since it contains content generated by a crowd. The cookbooks are meant to be used through an exploration process, i.e. browsing.Method: In this paper, we present a semi-automatic approach that organizes the crowd knowledge available on Stack Overflow to build cookbooks for APIs. We have generated cookbooks for three APIs widely used by the software development community: SWT, LINQ and QT. We have also defined desired properties that crowd cookbooks must meet, and we conducted an evaluation of the cookbooks against these properties with human subjects.Results: The results showed that the cookbooks built using our approach, in general, meet those properties. As a highlight, most of the recipes were considered appropriate to be in the cookbooks and have self-contained information.Conclusions: We concluded that our approach is capable to produce adequate cookbooks automatically, which can be as useful as manually produced cookbooks. This opens an opportunity for API designers to enrich existent cookbooks with the different points of view from the crowd, or even to generate initial versions of new cookbooks.

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Section: Rq #5mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bootstrapping cookbooks for APIs from crowd knowledge on Stack Overflow

Souza

Campos

Madeiral

et al. 2019

Information and Software Technology

Self Cite

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“…Literature has also analyzed SO in context of mobile development [18]. Campos et al [19] uses the criterion of text based matching to find a potential programming question for a user to answer. Moreover, work has gone deeper and has found that high reputation users are efficient in providing good answers [20,21].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding and evaluating the behavior of technical users. A study of developer interaction at StackOverflow

Ahmed

Srivastava

2017

Hum. Cent. Comput. Inf. Sci.

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This paper is focused on analyzing the details of one of the most widely used Q&A technical discussion forums on the Internet: StackOverflow. StackOverflow is a huge source of information for both academics and industry practitioners and its analysis can provide useful insights. This is evident by a growing body of work dedicated to the study of this platform. There are several papers that have taken the ‘platform’ as an analyzing point to gain a few useful insights into the practices adopted by software developers. However, different from current literature, the objective of this paper is to explore the habit of users, more specifically, we want to find out how do technical users behave online? In doing so, we attempt to present a new picture that focuses more on the human aspect of this online community. We neither focus on the technical aspects of the platform nor do we focus on the technical capabilities of developers, rather, the focus of this paper is to explore the humanistic point of view of technical users. To do that, we mine StackOverflow’s repositories to find a few patterns that raise several questions. The observations presented in this paper highlight real world implications of having open call based software engineering platforms. Further, we conduct a survey of StackOverflow users to find an answer to one of the highly talked about topics on Meta (a discussion forum for StackOverflow). The subject of the survey concerns changing participation habit of users. As the paper progresses forward, we discuss factors that raise the issue of professionalism and ethics at this online venue. The findings show several malpractices happening at StackOverflow. We present a detailed analysis and discuss these issues in this paper.

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“…We could not reuse the classifier built by Souza et al [7] and Campos et al [14], as this classifier does not address debug-corrective questions. Also the classifier built by Campos and Maia [15] does not focus only on how-to-doit and debug-corrective.…”

Section: Automatic Classification Of Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For Swing, 50% of the covered elements are covered by numbers of threads in the interval [1,8], and for Android in the interval [1,14], i.e., a large part of the covered elements are not related to a very large number of threads.…”

Section: How-to-do-it Coverage Of Api Elementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redocumenting APIs with crowd knowledge: a coverage analysis based on question types

et al. 2016

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Background: Software libraries and frameworks play an important role in software system development. The appropriate usage of their functionalities/components through their APIs, however, is a challenge for developers. Usually, API documentation, when it exists, is insufficient to assist them in their programming tasks. There are few API documentation writers for the many potential readers, resulting in the lack of explanations and examples concerning different scenarios and perspectives. The interaction of developers on the Web, on the other hand, generates content concerning APIs from different perspectives, which can be used to document APIs, also known as crowd documentation. Methods: In this paper, we present a study regarding the knowledge generated by the crowd on the Stack Overflow question-and-answer website. Our main goal is to understand how the crowd can contribute for API documentation on two programming tasks: how to implement a scenario using an API (how-to-do-it), and how to fix domain-independent bugs in an existing code where there was a misunderstanding regarding the usage of an API (debug-corrective). We classified questions available on Stack Overflow by the main concerns of askers, and we used those classified as how-to-do-it and debug-corrective to analyze the coverage of API elements on the discussions related to such questions. Our cases included the well-known and popular Swing and Android APIs. Results: Our main findings showed that the crowd provides more content for debug-corrective tasks than for how-to-do-it tasks, regardless of the API. Android API elements are more discussed by the crowd compared to Swing. Moreover, we observed that some API elements are frequently mentioned together in discussions, and that there is a strong association between API coverage on Stack Overflow and its usage in real software systems. Conclusions: Crowd documentation may not be a complete substitute for official documentation because of its partial coverage, especially for how-to-do-it tasks. However, it can still significantly enhance the existent documentation, especially for the most commonly used API elements, providing code samples and explanations on a large variety of usage nuances. Finally, taking advantage of the high coverage for debug-corrective tasks, a new kind of debugging assistant may be conceived.

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Searching crowd knowledge to recommend solutions for API usage tasks

Cited by 25 publications

References 41 publications

Bootstrapping cookbooks for APIs from crowd knowledge on Stack Overflow

Bootstrapping cookbooks for APIs from crowd knowledge on Stack Overflow

Understanding and evaluating the behavior of technical users. A study of developer interaction at StackOverflow

Redocumenting APIs with crowd knowledge: a coverage analysis based on question types

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