Harnessing Stack Overflow for the IDE
Abstract
Developers often consult online tutorials and message boards to find solutions to their programming issues. Among the many online resources, Question & Answer websites are gaining popularity. This is no wonder if we consider a case like Stack Overflow, where more than 92% questions on expert topics are answered in a median time of 11 minutes. This new resource has scarcely been acknowledged by any Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Even though developers spend a large part of their working time in IDEs, and the usage of Q&A services has dramatically increased, developers can only use such resources using external applications. We introduce Seahawk, an Eclipse plugin to integrate Stack Overflow crowd knowledge in the IDE. It allows developers to seamlessly access Stack Overflow data, thus obtaining answers without switching the context. We present our preliminary work on Seahawk: It allows users to (1) retrieve Q&A from Stack Overflow, (2) link relevant discussions to any source code in Eclipse, and (3) attach explanative comments to the links.
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References 14 · Cited by 60
- Authors
- Bacchelli, A., Ponzanelli, L., & Lanza, M.
- Affiliations
- Università della Svizzera italiana (CH)
- Venue
- 2012 Third International Workshop on Recommendation Systems for Software Engineering (RSSE)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2012-06
- Pages
- 26-30
- OpenAlex
- W4246606684
- Cited by
- 60
- References
- 14
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 4 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 6 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 3.77
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- International Workshop on Recommendation Systems for Software Engineering (RSSE) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Expert finding and Q&A systems
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Keywords
- Stack Overflow, question-and-answer websites, integrated development environment, Eclipse plug-in, developer Q&A, programming problem solving
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