Identifying Versions of Libraries used in Stack Overflow Code Snippets
Stack Overflow is a popular question and answer platform where developers share technical issues in the hope of receiving answers with potential solutions. The latter may include code snippets making use of library versions that have long since been succeeded by newer ones. Other developers finding such a snippet at a later point in time may be unaware of its outdatedness unless mentioned in a comment. Furthermore, it can be difficult to integrate the snippet without knowing the exact version of the library it is referencing. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to identifying ranges of Maven library versions that might have been used in a Java snippet on Stack Overflow. We use a prototype implementation of the approach to assess the overall outdatedness of Stack Overflow snippets with respect to the latest version of each referenced library available from Maven. We found a considerable number of snippets that use outdated library versions, which suggests that developers should be careful when adopting solutions from Stack Overflow.
Mon 17 MayDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
10:00 - 10:50 | Resources for MSR ResearchTechnical Papers / Data Showcase at MSR Room 1 Chair(s): Felipe Ebert Eindhoven University of Technology | ||
10:01 3mTalk | PSIMiner: A Tool for Mining Rich Abstract Syntax Trees from Code Technical Papers Egor Spirin JetBrains Research; National Research University Higher School of Economics, Egor Bogomolov JetBrains Research, Vladimir Kovalenko JetBrains Research, Timofey Bryksin JetBrains Research, Saint Petersburg State University Pre-print | ||
10:04 3mTalk | Mining DEV for social and technical insights about software development Technical Papers Maria Papoutsoglou Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Johannes Wachs Vienna University of Economics and Business & Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Georgia Kapitsaki University of Cyprus Pre-print | ||
10:07 3mTalk | TNM: A Tool for Mining of Socio-Technical Data from Git Repositories Technical Papers Nikolai Sviridov ITMO University, Mikhail Evtikhiev JetBrains Research, Vladimir Kovalenko JetBrains Research Pre-print | ||
10:10 3mTalk | Identifying Versions of Libraries used in Stack Overflow Code Snippets Technical Papers Ahmed Zerouali Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Camilo Velázquez-Rodríguez Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Coen De Roover Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pre-print Media Attached | ||
10:13 3mTalk | Sampling Projects in GitHub for MSR Studies Data Showcase Ozren Dabic Software Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Switzerland, Emad Aghajani Software Institute, USI Università della Svizzera italiana, Gabriele Bavota Software Institute, USI Università della Svizzera italiana Pre-print | ||
10:16 3mTalk | gambit – An Open Source Name Disambiguation Tool for Version Control Systems Technical Papers Christoph Gote Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Christian Zingg Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich Pre-print Media Attached | ||
10:19 31mLive Q&A | Discussions and Q&A Technical Papers |
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