skip to main content
10.1145/1985793.1985907acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web? (NIER track)

Published: 21 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, use social media to facilitate knowledge exchange between programmers and fill archives with millions of entries that contribute to the body of knowledge in software development. Understanding the role of Q&A websites in the documentation landscape will enable us to make recommendations on how individuals and companies can leverage this knowledge effectively. In this paper, we analyze data from Stack Overflow to categorize the kinds of questions that are asked, and to explore which questions are answered well and which ones remain unanswered. Our preliminary findings indicate that Q&A websites are particularly effective at code reviews and conceptual questions. We pose research questions and suggest future work to explore the motivations of programmers that contribute to Q&A websites, and to understand the implications of turning Q&A exchanges into technical mini-blogs through the editing of questions and answers.

References

[1]
L. A. Adamic, J. Zhang, E. Bakshy, and M. S. Ackerman. Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something. In WWW '08: Proc. of the 17th Intl. Conf. on World Wide Web, pages 665--674, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.
[2]
E. Agichtein, C. Castillo, D. Donato, A. Gionis, and G. Mishne. Finding high-quality content in social media. In Proc. of the Intl. Conf. on Web search and web data mining, WSDM '08, pages 183--194, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.
[3]
J. Bian, Y. Liu, E. Agichtein, and H. Zha. Finding the right facts in the crowd: factoid question answering over social media. In WWW '08: Proc. of the 17th Intl. Conf. on World Wide Web, pages 467--476, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.
[4]
T. Fritz and G. C. Murphy. Using information fragments to answer the questions developers ask. In Proc. of the 32nd Intl. Conf. on Software Engineering - Volume 1, ICSE '10, pages 175--184, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.
[5]
Z. Gyöngyi, G. Koutrika, J. Pedersen, and H. Garcia-Molina. Questioning yahoo! answers. Technical Report 2007-35, Stanford InfoLab, 2007.
[6]
A. J. Ko, R. DeLine, and G. Venolia. Information needs in collocated software development teams. In Proc. of the 29th Intl. Conf. on Software Engineering, ICSE '07, pages 344--353, Washington, DC, USA, 2007. IEEE.
[7]
T. D. LaToza and B. A. Myers. Hard-to-answer questions about code. In Proc. of the 2nd Workshop on the Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools, 2010.
[8]
S. Letovsky. Cognitive processes in program comprehension. In Proc. of the 1st Workshop on empirical studies of programmers, pages 58--79, Norwood, NJ, USA, 1986. Ablex Publishing Corp.
[9]
T. O'Reilly. What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software, 2005, accessed in December 2010. http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html.
[10]
P. N. Robillard. The role of knowledge in software development. Commun. ACM, 42(1):87--92, 1999.
[11]
C. Shah and J. Pomerantz. Evaluating and predicting answer quality in community QA. In Proc. of the 33rd Intl. Conf. on Research and development in information retrieval, SIGIR '10, pages 411--418, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.
[12]
J. Sillito, G. C. Murphy, and K. De Volder. Questions programmers ask during software evolution tasks. In Proc. of the 14th Intl. Symp. on Foundations of software engineering, SIGSOFT '06/FSE-14, pages 23--34, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web? (NIER track)

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICSE '11: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
    May 2011
    1258 pages
    ISBN:9781450304450
    DOI:10.1145/1985793
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 21 May 2011

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. q&a
    2. questions
    3. social media
    4. stack overflow

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    ICSE11
    Sponsor:
    ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering
    May 21 - 28, 2011
    HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

    Upcoming Conference

    ICSE 2025

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)94
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)14
    Reflects downloads up to 06 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media