1 research outputs found
On Using Stack Overflow Comment-Edit Pairs to recommend code maintenance changes
Code maintenance data sets typically consist of a before and after version of
the code that contains the improvement or fix. Such data sets are important for
software engineering support tools related to code maintenance, such as program
repair, code recommender systems, or Application Programming Interface (API)
misuse detection. Most of the current data sets are constructed from mining
commit history in version-control systems or issues in issue-tracking systems.
In this paper, we investigate whether Stack Overflow can be used as an
additional data source. Comments on Stack Overflow provide an effective way for
developers to point out problems with existing answers, alternative solutions,
or pitfalls. In this paper, we mine comment-edit pairs from Stack Overflow and
investigate their potential usefulness. These pairs have the added benefit of
having concrete descriptions of why the change is needed as well as potentially
having less tangled changes to deal with. We first design a technique to
extract related comment-edit pairs and then investigate the nature of these
pairs. We find that the majority of comment-edit pairs are not tangled, but
only 27% of the studied pairs are potentially useful for the above
applications. We categorize the types of mined pairs and find that the highest
ratio of useful pairs come from categories Correction, Obsolete, Flaw, and
Extension. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our extracted pairs, we
submitted 15 pull requests on GitHub, 10 of which have been accepted to widely
used repositories such as Apache Beam and nltk. Our work is the first to
investigate Stack Overflow comment-edit pairs and opens the door for future
work in this direction. Based on our findings and observations, we provide
concrete suggestions on how to potentially identify a larger set of useful
comment-edit pairs, which can also be facilitated by our shared data.Comment: 34 pages, 9 tables, 2 figures, submitted to EMS