What are developers talking about? An analysis of topics and trends in Stack Overflow

Barua, Anton; Thomas, Stephen W.; Hassan, Ahmed E.

doi:10.1007/s10664-012-9231-y

Cited by 505 publications

(369 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…This link rot 1 represents a significant issue with websites like Stack Overflow and is one of the reasons users are encouraged to duplicate content rather than just post links in their answers 2 . Ignoring 404 errors, Official Documentation was the most frequently referenced website type.…”

Section: A Website Type Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A study of innovation diffusion through link sharing on stack overflow

Hervás-Gómez

Cleary

Singer

2013

2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

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Abstract-It is poorly understood how developers discover and adopt software development innovations such as tools, libraries, frameworks, or web sites that support developers. Yet, being aware of and choosing appropriate tools and components can have a significant impact on the outcome of a software project. In our study, we investigate link sharing on Stack Overflow to gain insights into how software developers discover and disseminate innovations.We find that link sharing is a significant phenomenon on Stack Overflow, that Stack Overflow is an important resource for software development innovation dissemination and that its part of a larger interconnected network of online resources used and referenced by developers. This knowledge can guide researchers and practitioners who build tools and services that support software developers in the exploration, discovery, and adoption of software development innovations.

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Section: A Website Type Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A study of innovation diffusion through link sharing on stack overflow

Hervás-Gómez

Cleary

Singer

2013

2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

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“…Similar to the approach of Baura et al [15] we use a topic modeling technique --Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) as implemented by the Mallet tool [16] -to discover potential scenarios behind each usage obstacle. We tuned Mallet to generate 100 topics for posts under each API class.…”

Section: Topic Mining For Postsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting API usage obstacles: A study of iOS and Android developer questions

Wang

Godfrey

2013

2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

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Abstract-Software frameworks provide sets of generic functionalities that can be later customized for a specific task. When developers invoke API methods in a framework, they often encounter obstacles in finding the correct usage of the API, let alone to employ best practices. Previous research addresses this line of questions by mining API usage patterns to induce API usage templates, by conducting and compiling interviews of developers, and by inferring correlations among APIs. In this paper, we analyze API-related posts regarding iOS and Android development from a Q&A website, stackoverf low.com. Assuming that API-related posts are primarily about API usage obstacles, we find several iOS and Android API classes that appear to be particularly likely to challenge developers, even after we factor out API usage hotspots, inferred by modelling API usage of open source iOS and Android applications. For each API with usage obstacles, we further apply a topic mining tool to posts that are tagged with the API, and we discover several repetitive scenarios in which API usage obstacles occur. We consider our work as a stepping stone towards understanding API usage challenges based on forum-based input from a multitude of developers, input that is prohibitively expensive to collect through interviews. Our method helps to motivate future research in API usage, and can allow designers of platforms -such as iOS and Android -to better understand the problems developers have in using their platforms, and to make corresponding improvements.

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“…Although the authors provide evidence of issues that affect the bugs reported in the Android bug repository, those issues are related to hardwarefragmentation and not include the software-fragmentation perspective. Barua et al [2] used topic modeling to automatically extract the main discussion topics that software developers keep in Stack Overflow 1 (SO). Stack Overflow is a question & answer (Q&A) website widely used by developers to find and provide answers to technical issues and concerns in software development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Stack Overflow is a question & answer (Q&A) website widely used by developers to find and provide answers to technical issues and concerns in software development. In the study by Barua et al [2], a total of 973,267 questions and 2,501,720 answers, which represent 27 months of SO activity (from July 2008 to September 2010), were analyzed. The main topics identified by Barua et al [2] in SO are related to: web-related discussions, data management, platform-specific discussions, security, quality assurance and collaboration, knowledge/experience, and general discussions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the study by Barua et al [2], a total of 973,267 questions and 2,501,720 answers, which represent 27 months of SO activity (from July 2008 to September 2010), were analyzed. The main topics identified by Barua et al [2] in SO are related to: web-related discussions, data management, platform-specific discussions, security, quality assurance and collaboration, knowledge/experience, and general discussions. In addition, two of the conclusions drawn from the analysis were: (i) mobile application development is a trend topic, with an upward-tendency that increments faster than web development; (ii) Android and iPhone development is much more prevalent than Blackberry development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An exploratory analysis of mobile development issues using stack overflow

Linares‐Vásquez

Dit

Poshyvanyk

2013

2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

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Abstract-Question & answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow (SO), are widely used by developers to find and provide answers to technical issues and concerns in software development. Mobile development is not an exception to the rule. In the latest SO dump, more than 400K questions were labeled with tags related to mobile technologies. Although, previous works have analyzed the main topics and trends in SO threads, there are no studies devoted specifically to mobile development. In this paper we used topic modeling techniques to extract hottopics from mobile-development related questions. Our findings suggest that most of the questions include topics related to general questions and compatibility issues, and the most specific topics, such as crash reports and database connection, are present in a reduced set of questions.

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What are developers talking about? An analysis of topics and trends in Stack Overflow

Cited by 505 publications

References 30 publications

A study of innovation diffusion through link sharing on stack overflow

A study of innovation diffusion through link sharing on stack overflow

Detecting API usage obstacles: A study of iOS and Android developer questions

An exploratory analysis of mobile development issues using stack overflow

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