TY - GEN
T1 - An Exploratory Study on How Software Reuse is Discussed in Stack Overflow
AU - AlOmar, Eman Abdullah
AU - Barinas, Diego
AU - Liu, Jiaqian
AU - Mkaouer, Mohamed Wiem
AU - Ouni, Ali
AU - Newman, Christian
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Software reuse is an important and crucial quality attribute in modern software engineering, where almost all software projects, open source or commercial, no matter small or ultra-large, source code reuse in one way or another. Although software reuse has experienced an increased adoption throughout the years with the exponentially growing number of available third-party libraries, frameworks and APIs, little knowledge exists to investigate what aspects of code reuse developers discuss. In this study, we look into bridging this gap by examining Stack Overflow to understand the challenges developers encounter when trying to reuse code. Using the Stack Overflow tags “code-reuse” and “reusability”, we extracted and analyzed 1,409 posts, composed of questions and answers. Our findings indicate that despite being popular, reuse questions take relatively longer than typical other questions to receive an accepted answer. From these posts, we identified 9 categories that group the different ways developers discuss software reuse. We found Java and ASP.NET MVC to be the most discussed programming language and framework, respectively. Based on the programming languages and frameworks mentioned in the posts, we noted that Web software development is the most frequently targeted environment. This study can be utilized to further analyze aspects about software reuse and develop guidelines to be practiced in industry and taught when forming new developers.
AB - Software reuse is an important and crucial quality attribute in modern software engineering, where almost all software projects, open source or commercial, no matter small or ultra-large, source code reuse in one way or another. Although software reuse has experienced an increased adoption throughout the years with the exponentially growing number of available third-party libraries, frameworks and APIs, little knowledge exists to investigate what aspects of code reuse developers discuss. In this study, we look into bridging this gap by examining Stack Overflow to understand the challenges developers encounter when trying to reuse code. Using the Stack Overflow tags “code-reuse” and “reusability”, we extracted and analyzed 1,409 posts, composed of questions and answers. Our findings indicate that despite being popular, reuse questions take relatively longer than typical other questions to receive an accepted answer. From these posts, we identified 9 categories that group the different ways developers discuss software reuse. We found Java and ASP.NET MVC to be the most discussed programming language and framework, respectively. Based on the programming languages and frameworks mentioned in the posts, we noted that Web software development is the most frequently targeted environment. This study can be utilized to further analyze aspects about software reuse and develop guidelines to be practiced in industry and taught when forming new developers.
KW - Reusability
KW - Software reuse
KW - Stack overflow
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85097819880&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85097819880&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-64694-3_18
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-64694-3_18
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85097819880
SN - 9783030646936
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 292
EP - 303
BT - Reuse in Emerging Software Engineering Practices - 19th International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, ICSR 2020, Proceedings
A2 - Ben Sassi, Sihem
A2 - Ben Sassi, Sihem
A2 - Ducasse, Stéphane
A2 - Mili, Hafedh
T2 - 19th International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, ICSR 2020
Y2 - 2 December 2020 through 4 December 2020
ER -