Are code examples on an online Q&A forum reliable? a study of API misuse on stack overflow

Programmers often consult an online Q&A forum such as Stack Overflow to learn new APIs. This paper presents an empirical study on the prevalence and severity of API misuse on Stack Overflow. To reduce manual assessment effort, we design ExampleCheck, an API usage mining framework that extracts p...

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Veröffentlicht in:2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) S. 886 - 896
Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Tianyi, Upadhyaya, Ganesha, Reinhardt, Anastasia, Rajan, Hridesh, Kim, Miryung
Format: Tagungsbericht
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: New York, NY, USA ACM 27.05.2018
Schriftenreihe:ACM Conferences
Schlagworte:
API usage pattern
code example assessment
Data mining
General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Empirical studies
Java
Libraries
online Q&A forums
Software
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Collaboration in software development
Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Extra-functional properties > Software reliability
Software reliability
Syntactics
API usage pattern
online Q&A forum
code example assessment
ISBN:9781450356381, 1450356389
ISSN:1558-1225
Online-Zugang:Volltext
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Zusammenfassung:Programmers often consult an online Q&A forum such as Stack Overflow to learn new APIs. This paper presents an empirical study on the prevalence and severity of API misuse on Stack Overflow. To reduce manual assessment effort, we design ExampleCheck, an API usage mining framework that extracts patterns from over 380K Java repositories on GitHub and subsequently reports potential API usage violations in Stack Overflow posts. We analyze 217,818 Stack Overflow posts using ExampleCheck and find that 31% may have potential API usage violations that could produce unexpected behavior such as program crashes and resource leaks. Such API misuse is caused by three main reasons---missing control constructs, missing or incorrect order of API calls, and incorrect guard conditions. Even the posts that are accepted as correct answers or upvoted by other programmers are not necessarily more reliable than other posts in terms of API misuse. This study result calls for a new approach to augment Stack Overflow with alternative API usage details that are not typically shown in curated examples.
ISBN:9781450356381
1450356389
ISSN:1558-1225
DOI:10.1145/3180155.3180260