Investigating developer's questions using web scraping
Seminar Project
Introduction
We observed that developers ask various questions in online forums, mailings lists, etc. while working in software development teams. These questions are about classes, functions, and project structure and target different development activities like dead-code elimination, testing, code analysis etc. The website Stack Overflow is a major source of questions that developers ask.
Problem
While asking questions, developers mark their question with related topics called tags to achieve faster response times. The most popular tags emerge from the category of programming languages. However, people frequently do not assign development activities tags to the question. For example, the word “debugging” exists in 387,432 questions, but only about 10% questions have been assigned the corresponding tag.
Steps
- A literature review of features that can be helpful in predicting the topic from the question.
- Data collection from Stack Overflow posts.
- Information processing w.r.t. important fields like question title, body, comments and tags from the post.
- Data Cleansing
- Analysis of developer questions