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MSR 2018
Mon 28 - Tue 29 May 2018 Gothenburg, Sweden
co-located with * ICSE 2018 *

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 May

Displayed 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
59m
Talk
What do large commits tell us? A taxonomical study of large commits
Technical Papers
A: Abram Hindle University of Alberta, A: Daniel M. German , A: Ric Holt
Pre-print
09:59
17m
Full-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
7m
Short-paper
A Design Structure Matrix Approach for Measuring Co-Change-Modularity of Software Products
Technical Papers
A: Robert Benkoczi , A: Daya Gaur , A: Shahadat Hossain , A: Muhammad Khan University of Lethbridge
Link to publication DOI Pre-print
10:23
7m
Short-paper
A Study on Inappropriately Partitioned Commits --- How Much and What Kinds of IP Commits in Java Projects? ---
Technical Papers
A: Ryo Arima , A: Yoshiki Higo Osaka University, A: Shinji Kusumoto
Pre-print