Essential Sentences for Navigating Stack Overflow Answers
Date
2020
Authors
Nadi, S.
Treude, C.
Editors
Kontogiannis, K.
Khomh, F.
Chatzigeorgiou, A.
Fokaefs, M.E.
Zhou, M.
Khomh, F.
Chatzigeorgiou, A.
Fokaefs, M.E.
Zhou, M.
Advisors
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Conference paper
Citation
Proceedings of the Euromicro Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, CSMR, 2020 / Kontogiannis, K., Khomh, F., Chatzigeorgiou, A., Fokaefs, M.E., Zhou, M. (ed./s), pp.229-239
Statement of Responsibility
Sarah Nadi, Christoph Treude
Conference Name
IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER) (18 Feb 2020 - 21 Feb 2020 : London, ON, Canada)
Abstract
Stack Overflow (SO) has become an essential resource for software development. Despite its success and prevalence, navigating SO remains a challenge. Ideally, SO users could benefit from highlighted navigational cues that help them decide if an answer is relevant to their task and context. Such navigational cues could be in the form of essential sentences that help the searcher decide whether they want to read the answer or skip over it. In this paper, we compare four potential approaches for identifying essential sentences. We adopt two existing approaches and develop two new approaches based on the idea that contextual information in a sentence (e.g., “if using windows”) could help identify essential sentences. We compare the four techniques using a survey of 43 participants. Our participants indicate that it is not always easy to figure out what the best solution for their specific problem is, given the options, and that they would indeed like to easily spot contextual information that may narrow down the search. Our quantitative comparison of the techniques shows that there is no single technique sufficient for identifying essential sentences that can serve as navigational cues, while our qualitative analysis shows that participants valued explanations and specific conditions, and did not value filler sentences or speculations. Our work sheds light on the importance of navigational cues, and our findings can be used to guide future research to find the best combination of techniques to identify such cues.
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© 2020 IEEE