Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 405

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 11 of the 11 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web? (NIER track)

Open access
Treude, Christoph, Barzilay, Ohad, Storey, Margaret-Anne·2011·Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
DOI 10.1145/1985793.1985907
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, use social media to facilitate knowledge exchange between programmers and fill archives with millions of entries that contribute to the body of knowledge in software development. Understanding the role of Q&A websites in the documentation landscape will enable us to make recommendations on how individuals and companies can leverage this knowledge effectively. In this paper, we analyze data from Stack Overflow to categorize the kinds of questions that are asked, and to explore which questions are answered well and which ones remain unanswered. Our preliminary findings indicate that Q&A websites are particularly effective at code reviews and conceptual questions. We pose research questions and suggest future work to explore the motivations of programmers that contribute to Q&A websites, and to understand the implications of turning Q&A exchanges into technical mini-blogs through the editing of questions and answers.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/1985793.1985907

Cites

11 of 11 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 11 references

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Letovsky S., 1986, Proc. of the 1st Workshop on empirical studies of programmers, 58

Cited by

See all 405

Metadata

Authors
Treude, C., Barzilay, O., & Storey, M.-A.
Venue
Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
Publisher
ACM
Published
2011-05-21
Pages
804-807
ISSN
0270-5257 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1145/1985793.1985907
OpenAlex
W2123246351
Cited by
405
References
11
FWCI
17.07
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
green
Licence
www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Background (vor)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web? (NIER track). https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/1985793.1985907
The paper
Treude, C., Barzilay, O., & Storey, M.-A. (2011). How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web? (NIER track). Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1145/1985793.1985907

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.