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Mining questions asked by web developers

Published: 31 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Modern web applications consist of a significant amount of client- side code, written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. In this paper, we present a study of common challenges and misconceptions among web developers, by mining related questions asked on Stack Over- flow. We use unsupervised learning to categorize the mined questions and define a ranking algorithm to rank all the Stack Overflow questions based on their importance. We analyze the top 50 questions qualitatively. The results indicate that (1) the overall share of web development related discussions is increasing among developers, (2) browser related discussions are prevalent; however, this share is decreasing with time, (3) form validation and other DOM related discussions have been discussed consistently over time, (4) web related discussions are becoming more prevalent in mobile development, and (5) developers face implementation issues with new HTML5 features such as Canvas. We examine the implications of the results on the development, research, and standardization communities.

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  • (2024)Semantic Web Approaches in Stack OverflowInternational Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems10.4018/IJSWIS.35861720:1(1-61)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2024
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  • (2024)Understanding Fairness in Software Engineering: Insights from Stack Exchange SitesProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3674805.3686687(269-280)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
MSR 2014: Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
May 2014
427 pages
ISBN:9781450328630
DOI:10.1145/2597073
  • General Chair:
  • Premkumar Devanbu,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Sung Kim,
  • Martin Pinzger
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 31 May 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Stack Overflow
  2. Text Mining
  3. Topic Modeling
  4. Web Developers

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Semantic Web Approaches in Stack OverflowInternational Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems10.4018/IJSWIS.35861720:1(1-61)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Collaborative Solutions to Software Architecture Challenges Faced by IT ProfessionalsInternational Journal of Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals10.4018/IJHCITP.34283915:1(1-29)Online publication date: 2-May-2024
  • (2024)Understanding Fairness in Software Engineering: Insights from Stack Exchange SitesProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3674805.3686687(269-280)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
  • (2024)An Observational Study on Flask Web Framework Questions on Stack Overflow (SO)IET Software10.1049/sfw2/19055382024:1Online publication date: 19-Dec-2024
  • (2024)What is discussed about Flutter on Stack Overflow (SO) question-and-answer (Q&A) website: An empirical studyJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112089(112089)Online publication date: May-2024
  • (2024)Automatic title completion for Stack Overflow posts and GitHub issuesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10513-029:5Online publication date: 25-Jul-2024
  • (2024)How far are we with automated machine learning? characterization and challenges of AutoML toolkitsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10450-y29:4Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
  • (2024)How Order and Omission of Web Content Can Vary Unintentionally Across User Cohorts: A ReviewUniversal Access in Human-Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-60881-0_6(80-99)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Understanding the Topics and Challenges of GPU Programming by Classifying and Analyzing Stack Overflow PostsProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616365(1444-1456)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Similarities in Challenges faced by Developers: Investigations on Stack Overflow and GitHubProceedings of the 16th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference10.1145/3578527.3578539(1-11)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2023
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