SOTorrent: Reconstructing and Analyzing the Evolution Stack Overflow Posts
Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of code snippets and free-form text on a wide variety of topics. Like other software artifacts, questions and answers on SO evolve over time, for example when bugs in code snippets are fixed, code is updated to work with a more recent library version, or text surrounding a code snippet is edited for clarity. To be able to analyze how content on SO evolves, we built SOTorrent, an open dataset based on the official SO data dump. SOTorrent provides access to the version history of SO content at the level of whole posts and individual text or code blocks. It connects SO posts to other platforms by aggregating URLs from text blocks and by collecting references from GitHub files to SO posts. In this paper, we describe how we built SOTorrent, and in particular how we evaluated 134 different string similarity metrics regarding their applicability for reconstructing the version history of text and code blocks. Based on a first analysis using the dataset, we present insights into the evolution of SO posts, e.g., that post edits are usually small, happen soon after the initial creation of the post, and that code is rarely changed without also updating the surrounding text. Further, our analysis revealed a close relationship between post edits and comments. Our vision is that researchers will use SOTorrent to investigate and understand the evolution of SO posts and their relation to other platforms such as GitHub.
Tue 29 MayDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
09:00 - 10:30 | 2008 Most Influential Paper Award and Evolution and ChangesTechnical Papers at E4 room Chair(s): Cor-Paul Bezemer Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario | ||
09:00 59mTalk | What do large commits tell us? A taxonomical study of large commits Technical Papers Pre-print | ||
09:59 17mFull-paper | SOTorrent: Reconstructing and Analyzing the Evolution Stack Overflow Posts Technical Papers A: Sebastian Baltes University of Trier, A: Lorik Dumani , A: Christoph Treude The University of Adelaide, A: Stephan Diehl Computer Science, University Trier, Germany DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||
10:16 7mShort-paper | A Design Structure Matrix Approach for Measuring Co-Change-Modularity of Software Products Technical Papers Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
10:23 7mShort-paper | A Study on Inappropriately Partitioned Commits --- How Much and What Kinds of IP Commits in Java Projects? --- Technical Papers Pre-print |