Why is Developing Machine Learning Applications Challenging? A Study on Stack Overflow Posts

Alshangiti, Moayad; Sapkota, Hitesh; Murukannaiah, Pradeep K.; Liu, Xumin; Yu, Qi

doi:10.1109/esem.2019.8870187

Cited by 52 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…We have obtained thresholds of = 0.051 and = 4 for and , respectively, from unclosed Docker posts . Since a closed post may pose a possibility of being duplicated and irrelevant to discussion 5 , unclosed posts have been considered for ensuring Docker relevancy. Content-based filtering approach selects SoF posts whose ≥ and ≥ to develop of Docker posts which discuss about ' ' but does not have Docker in tag-set.…”

Section: 11mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We also calculate the median time (in minutes) to receive an accepted answer for a question. The longer the time to receive an accepted answer can be explained as a more difficult question [4,5,8,11]. In addition, we use Kendall correlation [2] to identify and verify correlation between popular and difficult topics.…”

Section: Rq2 Topic Characteristics -What Are the Characteristics In mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As aforementioned, many papers have investigated the software developers' perspectives by mining software repositories (eg, Github) and Q&A websites (eg, Sof). Some studies which leverage SoF data on different domains such as Machine Learning [5,11], Mobile [33], Security [23,42], Big data [8], Web development [9] and Concurrency [4]. Melo et al used Docker to reproduce codes derived from SoF posts.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An immense amount of knowledge is created within these communities, including question and answers on Docker technology, on configuration, troubleshooting, and various experiences. In the past, various works have turned to this vast repository of knowledge, using data mining techniques to understand the software developers' perspectives on various matters, such as DevOps [43], Machine Learning (ML) [5,11], Big Data [8], and software security [42].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Challenges in Docker Development

Haque¹,

Iwaya²,

Babar³

2020

Proceedings of the 14th ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)

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Background: Docker technology has been increasingly used among software developers in a multitude of projects. This growing interest is due to the fact that Docker technology supports a convenient process for creating and building containers, promoting close cooperation between developer and operations teams, and enabling continuous software delivery. As a fast-growing technology, it is important to identify the Docker-related topics that are most popular as well as existing challenges and difficulties that developers face. Aims: This paper presents a large-scale empirical study identifying practitioners' perspectives on Docker technology by mining posts from the Stack Overflow (SoF) community. Method: A dataset of 113, 922 Docker-related posts was created based on a set of relevant tags and contents. The dataset was cleaned and prepared. Topic modelling was conducted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), allowing the identification of dominant topics in the domain. Results: Our results show that most developers use SoF to ask about a broad spectrum of Docker topics including framework development, application deployment, continuous integration, web-server configuration and many more. We determined that 30 topics that developers discuss can be grouped into 13 main categories. Most of the posts belong to categories of application development, configuration, and networking. On the other hand, we find that the posts on monitoring status, transferring data, and authenticating users are more popular among developers compared to the other topics. Specifically, developers face challenges in web browser issues, networking error and memory management. Besides, there is a lack of experts in this domain. Conclusion: Our research findings will guide future work on the development of new tools and techniques, helping the community to focus efforts and understand existing trade-offs on Docker topics. CCS CONCEPTS • General and reference → Empirical studies; • Computing methodologies → Information extraction.

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Section: 11mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Rq2 Topic Characteristics -What Are the Characteristics In mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Challenges in Docker Development

Haque¹,

Iwaya²,

Babar³

2020

Proceedings of the 14th ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)

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show abstract

“…It has been a common practice for SE researchers to get insight into developers' concerns on different SE issues by mining related posts from SO [5,7,8,23,30,33]. In our study, we use SO as the data source because: (i) as one of the most popular community-driven Q&A websites, the users in SO range from novices to experts, increasing the diversity of the analyzed issues; (ii) developers often seek for help in SO after they cannot find solutions in documents or internet search, leading to more unsolvable and non-trivial build problems in our analyzed data; (iii) SO inherently contains build issues with implicit symptoms which are often hard to be captured in reproduced or historical build data, increasing comprehensiveness of the dataset.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding build issue resolution in practice: symptoms and fix patterns

Lou

Chen

Cao

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Softw

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Build systems are essential for modern software maintenance and development, while build failures occur frequently across software systems, inducing non-negligible costs in development activities. Build failure resolution is a challenging problem and multiple studies have demonstrated that developers spend non-trivial time in resolving encountered build failures; to relieve manual efforts, automated resolution techniques are emerging recently, which are promising but still limitedly effective. Understanding how build failures are resolved in practice can provide guidelines for both developers and researchers on build issue resolution. Therefore, this work presents a comprehensive study of fix patterns in practical build failures. Specifically, we study 1,080 build issues of three popular build systems Maven, Ant, and Gradle from Stack Overflow, construct a fine-granularity taxonomy of 50 categories regarding to the failure symptoms, and summarize the fix patterns for different failure types. Our key findings reveal that build issues stretch over a wide spectrum of symptoms; 67.96% of the build issues are fixed by modifying the build script code related to plugins and dependencies; and there are 20 symptom categories, more than half of whose build issues can be fixed by specific patterns. Furthermore, we also address the challenges in applying non-intuitive or simplistic fix patterns for developers. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging.

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An Exploratory Study on How Software Reuse is Discussed in Stack Overflow

AlOmar

Barinas

Liu

et al. 2020

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Software reuse is a crucial external quality attribute targeted by open-source and commercial projects. Despite that software reuse has experienced an increased adoption throughout the years, little is known about what aspects of code reuse developers discuss. In this paper, we present an empirical study of 1,409 posts to better understand the challenges developers face when reusing code. Our findings show that 'visual studio' is the top occurring bigrams for question posts, and there are frequent design patterns utilized by developers for the purpose of reuse. We envision our findings enabling researchers to develop guidelines to be utilized to foster software reuse.

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Why is Developing Machine Learning Applications Challenging? A Study on Stack Overflow Posts

Cited by 52 publications

References 26 publications

Challenges in Docker Development

Challenges in Docker Development

Understanding build issue resolution in practice: symptoms and fix patterns

An Exploratory Study on How Software Reuse is Discussed in Stack Overflow

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