Studying the Change History of Code Snippets on Stack Overflow and GitHub

Stack Overflow (SO) is a popular Q&A forum for software developers, providing ready to use code snippets. GH Developers often reuse SO code in their GitHub projects. These code snippets get revised and edited on both platforms after their creation and adoption. We investigate such evolution of posts and their adapted code on GitHub. To accomplish our goal, we mine the SOTorrent dataset. We then create and Analyze an evolutionary history of adapted code snippets by mining ~26K GitHub projects to study their evolution. Along with studying characteristics of projects that reference SO posts, we demonstrate that, on average, developers make 45 references to SO posts. We also found that 79\% of the SO posts with code snippets referenced in GitHub, do change over time (at least ones). Finally, our results show that snippets on both platforms evolve independently of one another.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Computer Science (M.C.S.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Master's

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Carleton University

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Manes, Saraj Singh

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright © 2020 the author(s). Theses may be used for non-commercial research, educational, or related academic purposes only. Such uses include personal study, research, scholarship, and teaching. Theses may only be shared by linking to Carleton University Institutional Repository and no part may be used without proper attribution to the author. No part may be used for commercial purposes directly or indirectly via a for-profit platform; no adaptation or derivative works are permitted without consent from the copyright owner.

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

10.22215/etd/2020-14169

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:carleton.scholaris.ca:20.500.14718/42210