Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 15
Facilitating Crowd Sourced Software
Engineering via Stack Overflow
Ohad Barzilay, Christoph Treude, and Alexey Zagalsky
Abstract
The open source community, as well as numerous technical blogs and
community web sites, put online vast quantities of free source code, ranging from
snippets to full-blown products. This code embodies the software development
community's domain knowledge, and mirrors the structure of the Internet: it is dis-
tributed rather than hierarchical; it is chaotic, incomplete, and inconsistent. Stack-
Overflow.com is a Question and Answer (Q&A) website which uses social media
to facilitate knowledge exchange between programmers by mitigating the pitfalls
involved in using code from the Internet. Its design nurtures a community of de-
velopers, and enables crowd sourced software engineering activities ranging from
documentation to providing useful, high quality code snippets to be used in produc-
tion. In this chapter we review Stack Overflow from three perspectives: (1) its design
and its social media characteristics, (2) the role it plays in the software documen-
tation landscape, and (3) the use of Stack Overflow in the context of the example
centric programming paradigm.
15.1 Introduction
Software development has been described as knowledge-intensive [
28
] and knowl-
edge management plays a central role in many software organizations. The design
and implementation of software systems requires knowledge that is often distributed
among many individuals with different areas of expertise and capabilities.
O. Barzilay (
)
A. Zagalsky
Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel
e-mail:
ohadbr@tau.ac.il;
alexeyza@tau.ac.il
C. Treude
Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
e-mail:
ctreude@uvic.ca
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