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Mining and relating design contexts and design patterns from Stack Overflow

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Abstract

Design contexts are factors that shape a design, and whilst they are recognised by developers, they are typically tacit. Unlike software requirements, software engineering researchers have paid little attention to design contexts and there is little or no systematic research on how design contexts influence design. In this paper, we conduct an empirical investigation using Stack Overflow with the aim of mining design context knowledge that is related to design patterns. We chose to study design patterns because they are clear and identifiable. In this work, we develop a new taxonomy of design context terms related to design patterns. We introduce a new automated mining approach, DPC Miner, for mining design context knowledge from Stack Overflow. Finally, we analyse the Stack Overflow posts and present how design context impacts decisions about design patterns in practice.

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Notes

  1. https://archive.org/download/stackexchange

  2. https://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.tokenize.html

  3. http://www.nltk.org/book/ch05.html

  4. https://github.com/laksW/Mining-and-Relating-Design-Contexts-and-DesignPatterns-from-Stack-Overflow.git

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Laksri Wijerathna, Aldeida Aleti & Tingting Bi

  2. Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Antony Tang

  3. Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

    Antony Tang

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  1. Laksri Wijerathna
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  2. Aldeida Aleti
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Correspondence to Laksri Wijerathna.

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Communicated by: Shaowei Wang, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Sebastian Baltes, Ivano Malavolta, Christoph Treude, and Alexander Serebrenik

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Wijerathna, L., Aleti, A., Bi, T. et al. Mining and relating design contexts and design patterns from Stack Overflow. Empir Software Eng 27, 8 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10034-0

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