Characterizing search activities on stack overflow

Abstract

To solve programming issues, developers commonly search on Stack Overflow to seek potential solutions. However, there is a gap between the knowledge developers are interested in and the knowledge they are able to retrieve using search engines. To help developers efficiently retrieve relevant knowledge on Stack Overflow, prior studies proposed several techniques to reformulate queries and generate summarized answers. However, few studies performed a large-scale analysis using real-world search logs. In this paper, we characterize how developers search on Stack Overflow using such logs. By doing so, we identify the challenges developers face when searching on Stack Overflow and seek opportunit..