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To improve software engineering, software repositories have been mined for code snippets and bug fixes. Typically, this mining takes place at the level of files or commits. To be able to dig deeper and to extract insights at a higher…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-05-07 Sebastian Baltes , Markus Wagner

Stack Overflow (SO) is the largest Q&A website for developers, providing a huge amount of copyable code snippets. Using these snippets raises various maintenance and legal issues. The SO license requires attribution, i.e., referencing the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-07-04 Sebastian Baltes , Richard Kiefer , Stephan Diehl

Recently, the large language models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary ability in understanding natural language and generating programming code. It has been a common practice of software engineers to consult LLMs when encountering coding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Li Zhong , Zilong Wang

An important goal for programmers is to minimize cost of identifying and correcting defects in source code. Code review is commonly used for identifying programming defects. However, manual code review has some shortcomings: a) it is time…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-09-13 Balwinder Sodhi , Shipra Sharma

Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of copyable code snippets. Like other software artifacts, code on SO evolves over time, for example when bugs are fixed or…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-03-20 Sebastian Baltes , Christoph Treude , Stephan Diehl

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-11 In-on Wiratsin , Chaiyong Ragkhitwetsagul , Matheus Paixao , Denis De Sousa , Pongpop Lapvikai , Peter Haddawy

Smart contract developers frequently seek solutions to developmental challenges on Q&A platforms such as Stack Overflow (SO). Although community responses often provide viable solutions, the embedded code snippets can also contain hidden…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Jiachi Chen , Chong Chen , Jiang Hu , John Grundy , Yanlin Wang , Ting Chen , Zibin Zheng

We study the impact of Stack Overflow code evolution on the stability of prior research findings derived from Stack Overflow data and provide recommendations for future studies. We systematically reviewed papers published between 2005--2023…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Alfusainey Jallow , Sven Bugiel

Traditional code search engines often do not perform well with natural language queries since they mostly apply keyword matching. These engines thus need carefully designed queries containing information about programming APIs for code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Mohammad Masudur Rahman , Chanchal K. Roy , David Lo

Coding is a fundamental skill required in the engineering discipline, and much work exists exploring better ways of teaching coding in the higher education context. In particular, Code Snippets (CSs) are approved to be an effective way of…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Joshua Akingbade , Jianhua Yang , Mir Seyedebrahimi

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving relevant code given a natural language query. While related to other information retrieval tasks, it requires bridging the gap between the language used in code (often abbreviated and highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Hamel Husain , Ho-Hsiang Wu , Tiferet Gazit , Miltiadis Allamanis , Marc Brockschmidt

We performed two online surveys of Stack Overflow answerers and visitors to assess their awareness to outdated code and software licenses in Stack Overflow answerers. The answerer survey targeted 607 highly reputed Stack Overflow users and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-06-22 Chaiyong Ragkhitwetsagul , Jens Krinke , Rocco Oliveto

Developers increasingly take to the Internet for code snippets to integrate into their programs. To save developers the time required to switch from their development environments to a web browser in the quest for a suitable code snippet,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-08-03 Brock Angus Campbell , Christoph Treude

Stack Overflow hosts valuable programming-related knowledge with 11,926,354 links that reference to the third-party websites. The links that reference to the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow websites extend the Stack Overflow…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Jiakun Liu , Xin Xia , David Lo , Haoxiang Zhang , Ying Zou , Ahmed E. Hassan , Shanping Li

Context: Software developers often ask questions on Technical Q&A forums like Stack Overflow (SO) to seek solutions to their programming-related problems (e.g., errors and unexpected behavior of code). Problem: Many questions miss required…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Saikat Mondal , Chanchal K. Roy

Reusing published datasets on the Web is of great interest to researchers and developers. Their data needs may be met by submitting queries to a dataset search engine to retrieve relevant datasets. In this ongoing work towards developing a…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-08-30 Jinchi Chen , Xiaxia Wang , Gong Cheng , Evgeny Kharlamov , Yuzhong Qu

Modern programming frameworks come with large libraries, with diverse applications such as for matching regular expressions, parsing XML files and sending email. Programmers often use search engines such as Google and Bing to learn about…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-02-16 Mukund Raghothaman , Yi Wei , Youssef Hamadi

StackOverflow (SO) is a widely used question-and-answer (Q\&A) website for software developers and computer scientists. GitHub is an online development platform used for storing, tracking, and collaborating on software projects. Prior work…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Juntong Chen , Yan Zhao , Na Meng

Software libraries are central to the functionality, security, and maintainability of modern code. As developers increasingly turn to Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist with programming tasks, understanding how these models recommend…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Jasmine Latendresse , SayedHassan Khatoonabadi , Emad Shihab

Code review is widely known as one of the best practices for software quality assurance in software development. In a typical code review process, reviewers check the code committed by developers to ensure the quality of the code, during…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Beiqi Zhang , Liming Fu , Peng Liang , Jiaxin Yu , Chong Wang