Reproducibility Challenges and Their Impacts on Technical Q&A Websites: The Practitioners' Perspectives

TL;DR

This study surveys Stack Overflow users to understand challenges in reproducing reported issues from code snippets, highlighting the need for interactive tools to improve reproducibility and support developers effectively.

Contribution

It provides insights into developers' perceptions of reproducibility challenges and emphasizes the importance of tool support to enhance problem-solving on Q&A platforms.

Findings

90% agree with existing challenges

Short code segments hinder reproducibility

Tool suggestions can improve code quality

Abstract

Software developers often look for solutions to their code-level problems by submitting questions to technical Q&A websites like Stack Overflow (SO). They usually include example code segments with questions to describe the programming issues. SO users prefer to reproduce the reported issues using the given code segments when they attempt to answer the questions. Unfortunately, such code segments could not always reproduce the issues due to several unmet challenges (e.g., external library not found) that might prevent questions from receiving prompt and appropriate solutions. A previous study produced a catalog of potential challenges that hinder the reproducibility of issues reported at SO questions. However, it is unknown how the practitioners (i.e., developers) perceive the challenge catalog. Understanding the developers' perspective is inevitable to introduce interactive tool support that promotes reproducibility. We thus attempt to understand developers' perspectives by surveying 53 users of SO. In particular, we attempt to -- (1) see developers' viewpoints on the agreement to those challenges, (2) find the potential impact of those challenges, (3) see how developers address them, and (4) determine and prioritize tool support needs. Survey results show that about 90% of participants agree to the already exposed challenges. However, they report some additional challenges (e.g., error log missing) that might prevent reproducibility. According to the participants, too short code segment and absence of required Class/Interface/Method from code segments severely prevent reproducibility, followed by missing important part of code. To promote reproducibility, participants strongly recommend introducing tool support that interacts with question submitters with suggestions for improving the code segments if the given code segments fail to reproduce the issues.