SOTorrent: Studying the Origin, Evolution, and Usage of Stack Overflow Code Snippets

TL;DR

SOTorrent is a comprehensive dataset that tracks the detailed evolution of code snippets and text on Stack Overflow, enabling researchers to analyze how community-shared code changes over time and across platforms.

Contribution

The paper introduces SOTorrent, an open dataset that captures version histories of Stack Overflow posts at the code and text level, linking them to external platforms like GitHub.

Findings

Provides detailed version history of SO code snippets and posts.

Connects SO snippets to external platforms via URLs and references.

Enables analysis of code evolution and maintenance on SO.

Abstract

Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of copyable code snippets. Like other software artifacts, code on SO evolves over time, for example when bugs are fixed or APIs are updated to the most recent version. To be able to analyze how code and the surrounding text on SO evolves, we built SOTorrent, an open dataset based on the official SO data dump. SOTorrent provides access to the version history of SO content at the level of whole posts and individual text and code blocks. It connects code snippets from SO posts to other platforms by aggregating URLs from surrounding text blocks and comments, and by collecting references from GitHub files to SO posts. Our vision is that researchers will use SOTorrent to investigate and understand the evolution and maintenance of code on SO and its relation to other platforms such as GitHub.