How do developers utilize source code from stack overflow?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Technical question and answer Q&A platforms, such as Stack Overflow, provide a platform for users to ask and answer questions about a wide variety of programming topics. These platforms accumulate a large amount of knowledge, including hundreds of thousands lines of source code. Developers can benefit from the source code that is attached to the questions and answers on Q&A platforms by copying or learning from (parts of) it. By understanding how developers utilize source code from Q&A platforms, we can provide insights for researchers which can be used to improve next-generation Q&A platforms to help developers reuse source code fast and easily. In this paper, we first conduct an exploratory study on 289 files from 182 open-source projects, which contain source code that has an explicit reference to a Stack Overflow post. Our goal is to understand how developers utilize code from Q&A platforms and to reveal barriers that may make code reuse more difficult. In 31.5% of the studied files, developers needed to modify source code from Stack Overflow to make it work in their own projects. The degree of required modification varied from simply renaming variables to rewriting the whole algorithm. Developers sometimes chose to implement an algorithm from scratch based on the descriptions from Stack Overflow answers, even if there was an implementation readily available in the post. In 35.5% of the studied files, developers used Stack Overflow posts as an information source for later reference. To further understand the barriers of reusing code and to obtain suggestions for improving the code reuse process on Q&A platforms, we conducted a survey with 453 open-source developers who are also on Stack Overflow. We found that the top 3 barriers that make it difficult for developers to reuse code from Stack Overflow are: (1) too much code modification required to fit in their projects, (2) incomprehensive code, and (3) low code quality. We summarized and analyzed all survey responses and we identified that developers suggest improvements for future Q&A platforms along the following dimensions: code quality, information enhancement & management, data organization, license, and the human factor. For instance, developers suggest to improve the code quality by adding an integrated validator that can test source code online, and an outdated code detection mechanism. Our findings can be used as a roadmap for researchers and developers to improve code reuse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.175 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".