In this paper, we proposed a novel framework which uses user interests inferred from activities (a.k.a., activity interests) in multiple social collaborative platforms to predict users' platform activities. Included in the framework are two prediction approaches: (i) direct platform activity prediction, which predicts a user's activities in a platform using his or her activity interests from the same platform (e.g., predict if a user answers a given Stack Overflow question using the user's interests inferred from his or her prior answer and favorite activities in Stack Overflow), and (ii) cross-platform activity prediction, which predicts a user's activities in a platform using his or her activity interests from another platform (e.g., predict if a user answers a given Stack Overflow question using the user's interests inferred from his or her fork and watch activities in GitHub). To evaluate our proposed method, we conduct prediction experiments on two widely used social collaborative platforms in the software development community: GitHub and Stack Overflow. Our experiments show that combining both direct and cross-platform activity prediction approaches yield the best accuracies for predicting user activities in GitHub (AUC=0.75) and Stack Overflow (AUC=0.89).
There have been few existing inter-platform studies on GitHub and Stack Overflow. performed a study on developers' involvement and productivity in Stack Overflow and GitHub @cite_14 . They found that users who are more active on GitHub (in terms of GitHub commits), tend to ask and answer more questions on Stack Overflow. @cite_21 did an empirical study on the correlation between different types of activities in the two platforms. Silvestri et at. @cite_37 proposed a user linkage model to link users' Stack Overflow, GitHub and Twitter accounts. More recently, Lee and Lo @cite_6 did an extensive study on users' interests across GitHub and Stack Overflow. In that study, the researchers found that users who have accounts with GitHub and Stack Overflow do exhibit similar interests observed from their activities in the two social collaborative platforms. Our work builds upon insights reported in @cite_6 by proposing a prediction method based on user interests across and within social collaborative platforms.
@cite_37 @cite_14 @cite_21 @cite_6
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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. 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. 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.