Perceptions on the Utility of Community Question and Answer Websites Like Stack Overflow to Software Developers

Software developers make use of on crowdsourcing during development. Beyond learning from others, developers use online portals such as Stack Overflow as a vehicle for collaboration. However, little is known about developers' experiences on such platforms, particularly around problems that are encountered online. Such insights could benefit software developers in terms of recommendations for pitfalls to avoid, ways to exploit crowdsourced knowledge, and the provision of insights to improve online code sharing communities. We interviewed 50 practitioners to fill this gap, where outcomes show that software developers' use of online portals is targeted, and such portals are a lifeline to modern software development. Practitioners are facilitated with code solutions and debugging, often in a very timely fashion. While these experiences are largely positive, practitioners also encounter negative experiences online, some of which could be significantly deleterious to the community. We discuss the implications of these findings, such as creating awareness of the quality and reliability of code snippets, improving code searches, code validation and outdated code detection and attribution of code snippets.

Automated summary

Software developers use crowdsourcing during development for collaboration and learning from others. However, little is known about their experiences on online platforms, particularly in solving encountered problems. Our study fills this gap by interviewing 50 practitioners, showing that online portals are crucial to modern software development, providing timely code solutions and debugging assistance, but also presenting potential negative experiences that could harm the community. We discuss implications like improving code search, validation, and attribution to address these findings.