Please note: This PhD seminar will take place online and in person in DC 2585.
Wenhan (Cosmos) Zhu, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
Supervisor: Professor Michael Godfrey
Stack Overflow has become one of the largest knowledge bases in Software Engineering. Both developers and researchers heavily leverage the information on Stack Overflow for their needs. Recent work has shown that answer comments form an important part of Stack Overflow question threads, and can contain rich information. In this work, we consider the comments attached to questions as question discussions that occur during question answering. We performed an empirical study to understand the nature of question discussions.
Our results suggest that questions and answers are not isolated events. The creation of an answer often occurs after a question discussion has taken place. We further investigate the users participating in question discussions and how question discussions could facilitate the answering process. Our findings suggest that question discussions contain a rich trove of data that is integral to the Q&A process on Stack Overflow.