StacerBot: A Stacktrace Search Engine for Stack Overflow

TL;DR

This paper introduces StacerBot, a search engine that helps developers find relevant Stack Overflow posts by submitting entire stacktrace error messages, improving upon traditional search methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel web-based search engine leveraging NLP techniques to match full stacktrace errors with relevant Stack Overflow posts in real-time.

Findings

Supports real-time queries within 50 seconds

Handles large-scale text matching with 300GB RAM server

Provides a comprehensive overview of NLP techniques used

Abstract

We as software developers or researchers very often get stacktrace error messages while we are trying to write some code or install some packages. Many times these error messages are very obscure and verbose; do not make much sense to us. There is a good chance that someone else has also faced similar issues probably shared similar stacktrace in various online developers' forums. However traditional google searches or other search engines are not very helpful to find web pages with similar stacktraces. In order to address this problem, we have developed a web interface; a better search engine: as an outcome of this research project where users can find appropriate stack overflow posts by submitting the whole stacktrace error message. The current developed solution can serve real-time parallel user queries with top-matched stack overflow posts within 50 seconds using a server with 300GB RAM. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the NLP techniques used in this study and an extensive overview of the research pipeline. This comprehensive result, limitations, and computational overhead mentioned in this study can be used by future researchers and software developers to build a better solution for this same problem or similar large-scale text matching-related tasks.