Does This Apply to Me? An Empirical Study of Technical Context in Stack Overflow

TL;DR

This study investigates how often and what kind of technical context is provided in Stack Overflow answers and comments, revealing that nearly half contain additional context that can aid navigation and relevance filtering.

Contribution

The paper provides an empirical analysis of technical context in Stack Overflow, highlighting its prevalence and types, and suggests its potential for improving information retrieval.

Findings

Nearly 50% of threads contain additional technical context.

Most additional context involves libraries, frameworks, languages, tools, APIs, or databases.

Technical context can serve as effective navigational cues.

Abstract

Stack Overflow has become an essential technical resource for developers. However, given the vast amount of knowledge available on Stack Overflow, finding the right information that is relevant for a given task is still challenging, especially when a developer is looking for a solution that applies to their specific requirements or technology stack. Clearly marking answers with their technical context, i.e., the information that characterizes the technologies and assumptions needed for this answer, is potentially one way to improve navigation. However, there is no information about how often such context is mentioned, and what kind of information it might offer. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to understand the occurrence of technical context in Stack Overflow answers and comments, using tags as a proxy for technical context. We specifically focus on additional context, where answers/comments mention information that is not already discussed in the question. Our results show that nearly half of our studied threads contain at least one additional context. We find that almost 50% of the additional context are either a library/framework, a programming language, a tool/application, an API, or a database. Overall, our findings show the promise of using additional context as navigational cues.