Abstract
Users of Question & Answer websites often include code fragments in their questions. However, large and unexplained code fragments make it harder for others to understand the question, thus possibly impacting the time required to obtain a correct answer. In this paper, we quantitatively study this relation: We look at questions containing code fragments and investigate the influence of explaining these fragments better on the time to answer. We devise an approach to quantify code explanations and apply it to ~300K posts. We find that it causes up to a 5σ (single-tail significant) increase in precision over baseline prediction times. This supports the use of our approach as an `edit suggestion': Questions with a low score could trigger a warning suggesting the user to better explain the included code.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2015 |
Editors | M. Di Penta |
Place of Publication | Piscataway.NJ |
Publisher | IEEE |
Pages | 442-445 |
Number of pages | 4 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-0-7695-5594-2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Event | MSR 2015, Florence, Italy - Piscataway Duration: 16 May 2015 → 17 May 2015 |
Conference
Conference | MSR 2015, Florence, Italy |
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Period | 16/05/15 → 17/05/15 |
Bibliographical note
harvestKeywords
- stack overflow
- answering time