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Measuring api documentation on the web
- in Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering, ser. Web2SE ’11
"... Software development blogs, developer forums and Q&A websites are changing the way software is documented. With these tools, developers can create and communicate knowledge and experiences without relying on a central authority to provide official documentation. Instead, any content created by a ..."
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Cited by 22 (6 self)
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Software development blogs, developer forums and Q&A websites are changing the way software is documented. With these tools, developers can create and communicate knowledge and experiences without relying on a central authority to provide official documentation. Instead, any content created by a developer is just a web search away. To understand whether documentation via social media can replace or augment more traditional forms of documentation, we study the extent to which the methods of one particular API — jQuery — are documented on the Web. We analyze 1,730 search results and show that software development blogs in particular cover 87.9 % of the API methods, mainly featuring tutorials and personal experiences about using the methods. Further, this effort is shared by a large group of developers contributing just a few blog posts. Our findings indicate that social media is more than a niche in software documentation, that it can provide high levels of coverage and that it gives readers a chance to engage with authors.
Crowd documentation: Exploring the coverage and the dynamics of api discussions on stack overflow,” Georgia Institute of Technology
, 2012
"... Traditionally, many types of software documentation, such as API documentation, require a process where a few people write for many potential users. The resulting documentation, when it exists, is often of poor quality and lacks sufficient examples and explanations. In this paper, we report on an em ..."
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Cited by 19 (2 self)
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Traditionally, many types of software documentation, such as API documentation, require a process where a few people write for many potential users. The resulting documentation, when it exists, is often of poor quality and lacks sufficient examples and explanations. In this paper, we report on an empirical study to investigate how Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, facilitate crowd documentation — knowledge that is written by many and read by many. We examine the crowd documentation for three popular APIs: Android, GWT, and the Java programming language. We collect usage data using Google Code Search, and analyze the coverage, quality, and dynamics of the Stack Overflow documentation for these APIs. We find that the crowd is capable of generating a rich source of content with code examples and discussion that is actively viewed and used by many more developers. For example, over 35,000 developers contributed questions and answers about the Android API, covering 87 % of the classes. This content has been viewed over 70 million times to date. However, there are shortcomings with crowd documentation, which we identify. In addition to our empirical study, we present future directions and tools that can be leveraged by other researchers and software designers for performing API analytics and mining of crowd documentation.
How Social Q&A Sites are Changing Knowledge Sharing in Open Source Software Communities
"... Historically, mailing lists have been the preferred means for coordinating development and user support activities. With the emergence and popularity growth of social Q&A sites such as the StackExchange network (e.g., StackOverflow), this is beginning to change. Such sites offer different socio- ..."
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Historically, mailing lists have been the preferred means for coordinating development and user support activities. With the emergence and popularity growth of social Q&A sites such as the StackExchange network (e.g., StackOverflow), this is beginning to change. Such sites offer different socio-technical incentives to their participants than mailing lists do, e.g., rich web environments to store and manage content col-laboratively, or a place to showcase their knowledge and ex-pertise more visibly to peers or potential recruiters. A key difference between StackExchange and mailing lists is gam-ification, i.e., StackExchange participants compete to obtain reputation points and badges. Using a case study of R, a popular data analysis software, in this paper we investigate how mailing list participation has evolved since the launch of StackExchange. Our main contribution is assembling a joint data set from the two sources, in which participants in both the r-help mailing list and StackExchange are identi-fiable. This allows for linking their activities across the two resources and also over time. With this data set we found that user support activities are showing a strong shift away from r-help. In particular, mailing list experts are mi-grating to StackExchange, where their behaviour is different. First, participants active both on r-help and on StackEx-change are more active than those who focus exclusively on only one of the two. Second, they provide faster answers on StackExchange than on r-help, suggesting they are moti-vated by the gamified environment. To our knowledge, our study is the first to directly chart the changes in behaviour of specific contributors as they migrate into gamified environ-ments, and has important implications for knowledge man-agement in software engineering. Author Keywords Crowdsourced knowledge; social Q&A; mailing lists; open
Wisdom in the Social Crowd: an Analysis of Quora
"... Efforts such as Wikipedia have shown the ability of user communities to collect, organize and curate information on the Internet. Recently, a number of question and answer (Q&A) sites have successfully built large growing knowledge repositories, each driven by a wide range of questions and answe ..."
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Cited by 16 (2 self)
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Efforts such as Wikipedia have shown the ability of user communities to collect, organize and curate information on the Internet. Recently, a number of question and answer (Q&A) sites have successfully built large growing knowledge repositories, each driven by a wide range of questions and answers from its users community. While sites like Yahoo Answers have stalled and begun to shrink, one site still going strong is Quora, a rapidly growing service that augments a regular Q&A system with social links between users. Despite its success, however, little is known about what drives Quora’s growth, and how it continues to connect visitors and experts to the right questions as it grows. In this paper, we present results of a detailed analysis of Quora using measurements. We shed light on the impact of three different connection networks (or graphs) inside Quora, a graph connecting topics to users, a social graph connecting users, and a graph connecting related questions. Our results show that heterogeneity in the user and question graphs are significant contributors to the quality of Quora’s knowledge base. One drives the attention and activity of users, and the other directs them to a small set of popular and interesting questions.
Should Your MOOC Forum Use a Reputation System?
"... Massive open online courses (MOOCs) rely primarily on discussion forums for interaction among students. We investigate how forum design affects student activity and learning outcomes through a field experiment with 1101 participants on the edX platform. We introduce a reputation system, which gives ..."
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Cited by 15 (1 self)
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Massive open online courses (MOOCs) rely primarily on discussion forums for interaction among students. We investigate how forum design affects student activity and learning outcomes through a field experiment with 1101 participants on the edX platform. We introduce a reputation system, which gives students points for making useful posts. We show that, as in other settings, use of forums in MOOCs is correlated with better grades and higher retention. Reputation systems additionally produce faster response times and larger numbers of responses per post, as well as differences in how students ask questions. However, reputation systems have no significant impact on grades, retention, or the students ’ subjective sense of community. This suggests that forums are essential for MOOCs, and reputation systems can improve the forum experience, but other techniques are needed to improve student outcomes and community formation. We also contribute a set of guidelines for running field experiments on MOOCs. Author Keywords Massive open online course; MOOC; forum; reputation
Discovering Essential Code Elements in Informal Documentation
"... Abstract—To access the knowledge contained in developer communication, such as forum posts, it is useful to determine automatically the code elements referred to in the discussions. We propose a novel traceability recovery approach to extract the code elements contained in various documents. As oppo ..."
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Cited by 14 (2 self)
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Abstract—To access the knowledge contained in developer communication, such as forum posts, it is useful to determine automatically the code elements referred to in the discussions. We propose a novel traceability recovery approach to extract the code elements contained in various documents. As opposed to previous work, our approach does not require an index of code elements to find links, which makes it particularly well-suited for the analysis of informal documentation. When evaluated on 188 StackOverflow answer posts containing 993 code elements, the technique performs with average 0.92 precision and 0.90 recall. As a major refinement on traditional traceability approaches, we also propose to detect which of the code elements in a document are salient, or germane, to the topic of the post. To this end we developed a three-feature decision tree classifier that performs with a precision of 0.65–0.74 and recall of 0.30–0.65, depending on the subject of the document. I.
Gender, Representation and Online Participation: A Quantitative Study of StackOverflow
"... Abstract—Online communities are flourishing as social meeting web-spaces for users and peer community members. Different online communities require different levels of competence for participants to join, and scattered evidence suggests that women can be overly under-represented. Moreover, anecdotal ..."
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Cited by 12 (8 self)
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Abstract—Online communities are flourishing as social meeting web-spaces for users and peer community members. Different online communities require different levels of competence for participants to join, and scattered evidence suggests that women can be overly under-represented. Moreover, anecdotal evidence of the Q&A website StackOverflow suggests that women withdraw from unfriendly online communities. Due to the lack of empirical evidence on the matter, this paper provides a quantitative study of the phenomenon, in order to assess the representation and social impact of gender in StackOverflow. This study positions itself within recent and focused international initiatives, launched by the European Commission in order to encourage women in the field of sciences and technology. Our findings confirm that men represent the vast majority of contributors to StackOverflow. Moreover, men participate more, earn more reputation, and engage in the “game ” more than women do. I.
Mining StackOverflow to Turn the IDE into a Selfconfident Programming Prompter
- in In Proceedings of MSR 2014 (11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories). ACM
"... Developers often require knowledge beyond the one they possess, which often boils down to consulting sources of information like Application Programming Interfaces (API) documentation, forums, Q&A websites, etc. Knowing what to search for and how is non-trivial, and developers spend time and ene ..."
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Cited by 10 (5 self)
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Developers often require knowledge beyond the one they possess, which often boils down to consulting sources of information like Application Programming Interfaces (API) documentation, forums, Q&A websites, etc. Knowing what to search for and how is non-trivial, and developers spend time and energy to formulate their problems as queries and to peruse and process the results. We propose a novel approach that, given a context in the IDE, automatically retrieves pertinent discussions from Stack Overflow, evaluates their relevance, and, if a given confidence threshold is surpassed, notifies the developer about the available help. We have implemented our approach in Prompter, an Eclipse plug-in. Prompter has been evaluated through two studies. The first was aimed at evaluating the devised ranking model, while the second was conducted to evaluate the usefulness of Prompter.
Harnessing Stack Overflow for the IDE
- In RSSE, IEEE
, 2012
"... Abstract—Developers often consult online tutorials and mes-sage boards to find solutions to their programming issues. Among the many online resources, Question & Answer websites are gaining popularity. This is no wonder if we consider a case like Stack Overflow, where more than 92 % questions on ..."
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Cited by 9 (2 self)
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Abstract—Developers often consult online tutorials and mes-sage boards to find solutions to their programming issues. Among the many online resources, Question & Answer websites are gaining popularity. This is no wonder if we consider a case like Stack Overflow, where more than 92 % questions on expert topics are answered in a median time of 11 minutes. This new resource has scarcely been acknowledged by any Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Even though developers spend a large part of their working time in IDEs, and the usage of Q&A services has dramatically increased, developers can only use such resources using external applications. We introduce Seahawk, an Eclipse plugin to integrate Stack Overflow crowd knowledge in the IDE. It allows developers to seamlessly access Stack Overflow data, thus obtaining answers without switching the context. We present our preliminary work on Seahawk: It allows users to (1) retrieve Q&A from Stack Overflow, (2) link relevant discussions to any source code in Eclipse, and (3) attach explanative comments to the links. Keywords-Q&A websites, Stack Overflow, Seahawk I.
Mutual Assessment in the Social Programmer Ecosystem: An Empirical Investigation of Developer Profile Aggregators
- In Proc. of the ACM 2013 Conf. on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW ’13
, 2013
"... The multitude of social media channels that programmers can use to participate in software development has given rise to online developer profiles that aggregate activity across many services. Studying members of such developer profile ag-gregators, we found an ecosystem that revolves around the soc ..."
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Cited by 9 (3 self)
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The multitude of social media channels that programmers can use to participate in software development has given rise to online developer profiles that aggregate activity across many services. Studying members of such developer profile ag-gregators, we found an ecosystem that revolves around the social programmer. Developers are assessing each other to evaluate whether other developers are interesting, worth fol-lowing, or worth collaborating with. They are self-conscious about being assessed, and thus manage their public images. They value passion for software development, new technolo-gies, and learning. Some recruiters participate in the ecosys-tem and use it to find candidates for hiring; other recruiters struggle with the interpretation of signals and issues of trust. This mutual assessment is changing how software engineers collaborate and how they advance their skills.
