An Empirical Analysis on Reducing Open Source Software Development Tasks using Stack Overflow

Objectives: The cross repository analysis between Open Source Software (OSS) and Community Question Answering (CQA) site is presented in order to speed the development process of OSS. Methods/Analysis: The OSS development is becoming popular nowadays due to fact that the source codes, the developer specifications and bug lists are made available online to the public. Anyone can contribute to the development of software by referring these files. Similarly, Stack Overflow is an interactive CQA site that caters programming related questions with their answers online and turned into repositories of software engineering knowledge. In order to track the correlation of such sites with software development tasks, we employ the two repositories to find the semantic similarity between bugs and Question and Answer (Q&A) posts posted on OSS projects and Stack Overflow respectively. The semantic similarity is analyzed by integrating the contents of the repositories based on text mining approach. The relationship between a bug and Q&A post is established through the semantic similarity and metadata features. Findings: The statistics of our analysis is presented for five OSS projects in terms of number of bugs and average bug fix time. The statistical result shows that the bug fix time can be reduced by posting the bugs into Stack Overflow. Application/Improvement: The presented approach can be utilized to find the similar Q&A posts for reported OSS bug and helps developers of OSS projects to resolve the bugs quickly by leveraging programming skills of users' in the form of Q&A posts.