How to formulate specific how-to questions in software development?

• Main Authors: LIU, Mingwei, PENG, Xin, MARCUS, Andrian, TREUDE, Christoph, XIE, Jiazhan, XU, Huanjun, YANG, Yanjun
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Programming Task; Query Formulation; Stack Overflow; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8900; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9903/viewcontent/fse22a.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Developers often ask how-to questions using search engines, technical Q&A communities, and interactive Q&A systems to seek help for specific programming tasks. However, they often do not formulate the questions in a specific way, making it hard for the systems to return the best answers. We propose an approach (TaskKG4Q) that interactively helps developers formulate a programming related how-to question. TaskKG4Q is using a programming task knowledge graph (task KG in short) mined from Stack Overflow questions, which provides a hierarchical conceptual structure for tasks in terms of [actions], [objects], and [constraints]. An empirical evaluation of the intrinsic quality of the task KG revealed that 75.0% of the annotated questions in the task KG are correct. The comparison between TaskKG4Q and two baselines revealed that TaskKG4Q can help developers formulate more specific how-to questions. More so, an empirical study with novice programmers revealed that they write more effective questions for finding answers to their programming tasks on Stack Overflow.