Related papers: A Study of Update Request Comments in Stack Overfl…
Comments in software are critical for maintenance and reuse. But apart from prescriptive advice, there is little practical support or quantitative understanding of what makes a comment useful. In this paper, we introduce the task of…
A central function of code review is to increase understanding; helping reviewers understand a code change aids in knowledge transfer and finding bugs. Comments in code largely serve a similar purpose, helping future readers understand the…
Software development is a collaborative process that involves various interactions among individuals and teams. TODO comments in source code play a critical role in managing and coordinating diverse tasks during this process. However, this…
Mocking is a common unit testing technique that is used to simplify tests, reduce flakiness, and improve coverage by replacing real dependencies with simplified implementations. Despite its widespread use in Open Source Software projects,…
When changing code, developers sometimes neglect updating the related comments, bringing inconsistent or outdated comments. These comments increase the cost of program understanding and greatly reduce software maintainability. Researchers…
Context: Navigating the knowledge of Stack Overflow (SO) remains challenging. To make the posts vivid to users, SO allows users to write and edit posts with Markdown or HTML so that users can leverage various formatting styles (e.g., bold,…
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…
Q&A platforms have been crucial for the online help-seeking behavior of programmers. However, the recent popularity of ChatGPT is altering this trend. Despite this popularity, no comprehensive study has been conducted to evaluate the…
Code comments are important artifacts in software systems and play a paramount role in many software engineering (SE) tasks related to maintenance and program comprehension. However, while it is widely accepted that high quality matters in…
Inline comments in the source code facilitate easy comprehension, reusability, and enhanced readability. However, code snippets in answers on Q&A sites like Stack Overflow (SO) often lack comments because answerers volunteer their time and…
Online platforms where volunteers answer each other's questions are important sources of knowledge, yet participation is declining. We ran a pre-registered experiment on Stack Overflow, one of the largest Q&A communities for software…
Platforms are increasingly relying on algorithms to curate the content within users' social media feeds. However, the growing prominence of proprietary, algorithmically curated feeds has concealed what factors influence the presentation of…
Software developers often look for solutions to their code-level problems by submitting questions to technical Q&A websites like Stack Overflow (SO). They usually include example code segments with questions to describe the programming…
Explanations are essential in software engineering (SE) and requirements communication, helping stakeholders clarify ambiguities, justify design choices, and build shared understanding. Online Q&A forums such as Stack Overflow provide…
Social scientists have shown that up to 50% if the content posted to a news article have no relation to its journalistic content. In this study we propose a classification algorithm to categorize user comments posted to a new article base…
Natural language comments convey key aspects of source code such as implementation, usage, and pre- and post-conditions. Failure to update comments accordingly when the corresponding code is modified introduces inconsistencies, which is…
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…
Stack Overflow (SO) has been a great source of natural language questions and their code solutions (i.e., question-code pairs), which are critical for many tasks including code retrieval and annotation. In most existing research,…
Code reviews are one of the effective methods to estimate defectiveness in source code. However, the existing methods are dependent on experts or inefficient. In this paper, we improve the performance (in terms of speed and memory usage) of…
Community Question Answering is the field of computational linguistics that deals with problems derived from the questions and answers posted to websites such as Quora or Stack Overflow. Among some of these problems we find the issue of…