A Survey on Mining Stack Overflow for Debugging and Generating Code and API Description

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Mining Stack Overflow for Debugging and Generating Code and 
API Description"

by

Mr. Fuxiang CHEN


Abstract:

Debugging is hard. Even though root causes to bugs are found, fixing them is 
non- trivial and requires a significant amount of time. A previous study has 
reported that the median time to fix a single bug is 200 days. The lack of 
documentation such as code and API descriptions are reported to be the major 
causes of defects in software development. Stack Overflow is a question and 
answering forum for developers. Within two years of its establishment, it has 
garnered approximately 300,000 registered users and greater than seven millions 
of monthly visits. Furthermore, there are millions of posts in Stack Overflow 
and this makes Stack Overflow provide valuable information for generating code 
and API description, as well as debugging.

In this paper, we provide a survey on mining Stack Overflow for debugging and 
generating code and API descriptions. First, we discuss the challenges in 
mining Stack Overflow, which consists of both natural text and code snippets. 
Second, we introduce how Stack Overflow is used to detect and fix (or recommend 
fixes to) different kinds of bugs, including crash bugs, configuration bugs, 
and runtime bugs. Finally, we introduce the different techniques used in 
generating code and API descriptions by mining Stack Overflow. From this 
survey, we can learn different techniques in mining Stack Overflow for 
debugging and generating code and API descriptions, with their strengths and 
weaknesses. The discussed challenges can shed light to our future work.


Date:			Monday, 13 November 2017

Time:                  	2:30pm - 4:30pm

Venue:                  Room 2408
                         Lifts 17/18

Committee Members:	Dr. Sunghun Kim (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Andrew Horner (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Frederick Lochovsky
 			Dr. Raymond Wong

**** ALL are Welcome ****