Increasingly, software developers are using a wide array of social collaborative platforms for software development and learning. In this work, we examined the similarities in developer's interests within and across GitHub and Stack Overflow. Our study finds that developers share common interests in GitHub and Stack Overflow, on average, 39 of the GitHub repositories and Stack Overflow questions that a developer had participated fall in the common interests. Also, developers do share similar interests with other developers who co-participated activities in the two platforms. In particular, developers who co-commit and co-pull-request same GitHub repositories and co-answer same Stack Overflow questions, share more common interests compare to other developers who co-participate in other platform activities.
Stack Overflow and GitHub have also been studied for empirical works on developer interests. For example, there were research works that focused on analyzing topics asked by developers in Stack Overflow @cite_1 @cite_5 @cite_8 @cite_4 @cite_15 @cite_16 . Similarly, there were also works on analyzing programming languages used by developers in GitHub and their relationships to GitHub contributions @cite_7 @cite_10 @cite_0 @cite_9 @cite_14 @cite_13 @cite_12 . There are also studies characterizing social network properties of GitHub and Stack Overflow @cite_3 @cite_16 . Our work extends this group of research by comparing developer interests in the two social collaborative platforms. To our best of knowledge, our work is the first inter-network study that examines cross-site developer interests in GitHub and Stack Overflow.
@cite_13 @cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_12
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Increasingly, software developers are using a wide array of social collaborative platforms for software development and learning. In this work, we examined the similarities in developer’s interests within and across GitHub and Stack Overflow. Our study finds that developers share common interests in GitHub and Stack Overflow; on average, 39 of the GitHub repositories and Stack Overflow questions that a developer had participated fall in the common interests. Also, developers do share similar interests with other developers who co-participated activities in the two platforms. In particular, developers who co-commit and co-pull-request same GitHub repositories and co-answer same Stack Overflow questions, share more common interests compare to other developers who co-participate in other platform activities. Software developers are increasingly adopting social-media platforms to contribute to software development, learn and develop a reputation for themselves. GitHub supports version-controlled code sharing and social-networking functionalities and Stack Overflow is a social forum for question answering on programming topics. Motivated by the features' overlap of the two networks, we set out to mine and analyze and correlate the members' core contributions, editorial activities and influence in the two networks. We aim to better understand the similarities and differences of the members' contributions in the two platforms and their evolution over time. In this context, while studying the activities of different user groups, we conducted a three-step investigation of GitHub activity, Stack Overflow activity and inter-network activity over a five-year period. We report our findings on interesting membership and activity patterns within each platform and some relations between the two. Stack Overflow is a popular on-line programming question and answer community providing its participants with rapid access to knowledge and expertise of their peers, especially benefitting coders. Despite the popularity of Stack Overflow, its role in the work cycle of open-source developers is yet to be understood: on the one hand, participation in it has the potential to increase the knowledge of individual developers thus improving and speeding up the development process. On the other hand, participation in Stack Overflow may interrupt the regular working rhythm of the developer, hence also possibly slow down the development process. In this paper we investigate the interplay between Stack Overflow activities and the development process, reflected by code changes committed to the largest social coding repository, GitHub. Our study shows that active GitHub committers ask fewer questions and provide more answers than others. Moreover, we observe that active Stack Overflow askers distribute their work in a less uniform way than developers that do not ask questions. Finally, we show that despite the interruptions incurred, the Stack Overflow activity rate correlates with the code changing activity in GitHub. When programmers look for how to achieve certain programming tasks, Stack Overflow is a popular destination in search engine results. Over the years, Stack Overflow has accumulated an impressive knowledge base of snippets of code that are amply documented. We are interested in studying how programmers use these snippets of code in their projects. Can we find Stack Overflow snippets in real projects? When snippets are used, is this copy literal or does it suffer adaptations? And are these adaptations specializations required by the idiosyncrasies of the target artifact, or are they motivated by specific requirements of the programmer? The large-scale study presented on this paper analyzes 909k non-fork Python projects hosted on Github, which contain 290M function definitions, and 1.9M Python snippets captured in Stack Overflow. Results are presented as quantitative analysis of block-level code cloning intra and inter Stack Overflow and GitHub, and as an analysis of programming behaviors through the qualitative analysis of our findings.