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MSR 2022
Mon 23 - Tue 24 May 2022
co-located with ICSE 2022
Tue 17 May 2022 22:08 - 22:15 at MSR Main room - even hours - Session 1 Chair(s): Hongyu Zhang, Masud Rahman

Stack Overflow has become an essential technical resource for developers. However, given the vast amount of knowledge available on Stack Overflow, finding the right information that is relevant for a given task is still challenging, especially when a developer is looking for a solution that applies to their specific requirements or technology stack. Clearly marking answers with their \textit{context}, i.e., the information that characterizes the technologies and assumptions needed for this answer, is potentially one way to improve navigation. However, there is no information about how often such context is mentioned, and what kind of information it might offer. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to understand the occurrence of technical context in Stack Overflow answers and comments, using tags as a proxy for technical context. We specifically focus on \textit{additional context}, where answers/comments mention information that is not already discussed in the question. Our results show that nearly half of our studied threads contain at least one additional context. We find that almost 50% of the additional context are either a library/framework, a programming language, a tool/application, an API, or a database. We also find that answer votes alone are not a good indicator of the presence of additional context in an answer, which suggests that further visual cues to aid navigation may be needed. Overall, our findings show the promise of using additional context as navigational cues.

Tue 17 May

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

22:00 - 22:50
Session 1Technical Papers / Registered Reports at MSR Main room - even hours
Chair(s): Hongyu Zhang University of Newcastle, Masud Rahman Dalhousie University
22:00
4m
Short-paper
An Empirical Evaluation of GitHub Copilot’s Code Suggestions
Technical Papers
Nhan Nguyen University of Alberta, Sarah Nadi University of Alberta
DOI Pre-print
22:04
4m
Short-paper
Comments on Comments: Where Code Review and Documentation Meet
Technical Papers
Nikitha Rao Carnegie Mellon University, Jason Tsay IBM Research, Martin Hirzel IBM Research, Vincent J. Hellendoorn Carnegie Mellon University
DOI Pre-print File Attached
22:08
7m
Talk
Does This Apply to Me? An Empirical Study of Technical Context in Stack Overflow
Technical Papers
Akalanka Galappaththi University of Alberta, Sarah Nadi University of Alberta, Christoph Treude University of Melbourne
DOI Pre-print Media Attached
22:15
7m
Talk
Towards Reliable Agile Iterative Planning via Predicting Documentation Changes of Work Items
Technical Papers
Jirat Pasuksmit University of Melbourne, Patanamon Thongtanunam University of Melbourne, Shanika Karunasekera The University of Melbourne
22:22
7m
Talk
BotHunter: An Approach to Detect Software Bots in GitHub
Technical Papers
Ahmad Abdellatif Concordia University, Mairieli Wessel Delft University of Technology, Igor Steinmacher Northern Arizona University, Marco Gerosa Northern Arizona University, USA, Emad Shihab Concordia University
Pre-print
22:29
7m
Talk
Recommending Code Improvements Based on Stack Overflow Answer Edits
Registered Reports
Chaiyong Ragkhitwetsagul Mahidol University, Thailand, Matheus Paixao University of Fortaleza
Pre-print
22:36
14m
Live Q&A
Discussions and Q&A
Technical Papers


Information for Participants
Tue 17 May 2022 22:00 - 22:50 at MSR Main room - even hours - Session 1 Chair(s): Hongyu Zhang, Masud Rahman
Info for room MSR Main room - even hours:

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