An Exploration of npm Package Co-Usage Examples from Stack Overflow: A Case Study

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Stack Overflow discussions relate to npm package usage, revealing that popular libraries are less discussed but accepted answers contain reusable examples that could aid developers.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of npm package co-usage in Stack Overflow posts, highlighting the potential of accepted answers for tool support despite less frequent discussion of popular libraries.

Findings

Popular libraries are less discussed in SO.

Accepted answers often contain reusable usage examples.

Reused examples could support developer tools.

Abstract

Third-party package usage has become a common practice in contemporary software development. Developers often face different challenges, including choosing the right libraries, installing errors, discrepancies, setting up the environment, and building failures during software development. The risks of maintaining a third-party package are well known, but it is unclear how information from Stack Overflow (SO) can be useful. This paper performed an empirical study to explore npm co-usage in SO. From over 30,000 SO posts, we extracted 2,100 SO posts related to npm and matched them to 217,934 npm library packages. We find that, popular and highly used libraries are not discussed as often in SO. However, we can see that the accepted answers may prove useful, as we believe that the usage examples and executable commands could be reused for tool support.