Facilitating Crowd Sourced Software Engineering via Stack Overflow - Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse - page 291

Fig. 15.1 Stack overflow screen capture
15.4 Stack Overflow in the Documentation Landscape
In this section, we pose research questions and report preliminary results to identify
the role of Q&A websites in software development using qualitative and quantitative
research methods. Our findings, obtained through the analysis of archival data from
Stack Overflow and qualitative coding, indicate that Q&A websites are particularly
effective at code reviews, explaining conceptual issues and answering newcomer
questions. The most common use of Stack Overflow is for how-to questions, and
its dominant programming languages are C#, Java, PHP and JavaScript. Ultimately,
understanding the processes that lead to the creation of knowledge on Q&A websites
will enable us to make recommendations on how individuals and companies, as
well as tools for programmers, can leverage the knowledge and use Q&A websites
effectively. One such tool, Example Overflow, will be introduced in Sect. 15.5 .