Abstract-StackOverflow is a popular on-line programming question and answer community providing its participants with rapid access to knowledge and expertise of their peers, especially benefitting coders. Despite the popularity of StackOverflow, its role in the work cycle of open-source developers is yet to be understood: on the one hand, participation in it has the potential to increase the knowledge of individual developers thus improving and speeding up the development process. On the other hand, participation in StackOverflow may interrupt the regular working rhythm of the developer, hence also possibly slow down the development process. In this paper we investigate the interplay between StackOverflow activities and the development process, reflected by code changes committed to the largest social coding repository, GitHub. Our study shows that active GitHub committers ask fewer questions and provide more answers than others. Moreover, we observe that active StackOverflow askers distribute their work in a less uniform way than developers that do not ask questions. Finally, we show that despite the interruptions incurred, the StackOverflow activity rate correlates with the code changing activity in GitHub.
In REF , the authors investigated the interplay between StackOverflow activities and the development process, reflected by code changes committed to the largest social coding repository GitHub.
StackOverflow and GitHub: Associations between Software Development and Crowdsourced Knowledge
2013 International Conference on Social Computing
2013 International Conference on Social Computing
Computer Science