Toward understanding the causes of unanswered questions in software information sites: a case study of stack overflow

Authors:
Ripon K. Saha;Avigit K. Saha;Dewayne E. Perry
Affiliations:
University of Texas at Austin, USA;University of Saskatchewan, Canada;University of Texas at Austin, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
Year:
2013

Citing 3
Cited 0

The WEKA data mining software: an update

ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
Discovering value from community activity on focused question answering sites: a case study of stack overflow

Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Answering questions about unanswered questions of stack overflow

Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Stack Overflow is a highly successful question-answering website in the programming community, which not only provide quick solutions to programmers’ questions but also is considered as a large repository of valuable software engineering knowledge. However, despite having a very engaged and active user community, Stack Overflow currently has more than 300K unanswered questions. In this paper, we perform an initial investigation to understand why these questions remain unanswered by applying a combination of statistical and data mining techniques. Our preliminary results indicate that although there are some topics that were never answered, most questions remained unanswered because they apparently are of little interest to the user community.