How Do Java Developers Reuse StackOverflow Answers in Their GitHub Projects?

TL;DR

This study empirically investigates how Java developers reuse StackOverflow answers in GitHub projects, revealing patterns in answer characteristics, reuse practices, and providing insights for improving answer quality.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid method combining clone detection, keyword search, and manual inspection to identify reused SO answers in GitHub Java projects, offering new insights into reuse behaviors.

Findings

Most reused answers provide code for specific tasks.

Reused answers tend to have higher scores and older ages.

Only 9% of code snippets are fully copied; most are partial or rewritten.

Abstract

StackOverflow (SO) is a widely used question-and-answer (Q\&A) website for software developers and computer scientists. GitHub is an online development platform used for storing, tracking, and collaborating on software projects. Prior work relates the information mined from both platforms to link user accounts or compare developers' activities across platforms. However, not much work is done to characterize the SO answers reused by GitHub projects. For this paper, we did an empirical study by mining the SO answers reused by Java projects available on GitHub. We created a hybrid approach of clone detection, keyword-based search, and manual inspection, to identify the answer(s) actually leveraged by developers. Based on the identified answers, we further studied topics of the discussion threads, answer characteristics (e.g., scores, ages, code lengths, and text lengths), and developers' reuse practices. We observed that most reused answers offer programs to implement specific coding tasks. Among all analyzed SO discussion threads, the reused answers often have relatively higher scores, older ages, longer code, and longer text than unused answers. In only 9% of scenarios (40/430), developers fully copied answer code for reuse. In the remaining scenarios, they reused partial code or created brand new code from scratch. Our study characterized 130 SO discussion threads referred to by Java developers in 357 GitHub projects. Our empirical findings can guide SO answerers to provide better answers, and shed lights on future research related to SO and GitHub.