Developers often look for solutions to programming problems in community Q&A sites like Stack Overflow. Due to the crowdsourcing nature of these Q&A sites, many userprovided answers are wrong, less optimal or out-of-date. Relying on community-curated quality indicators (e.g., accepted answer, answer vote) cannot reliably identify these answer problems. Such problematic answers are often criticized by other users. However, these critiques are not readily discoverable when reading the posts. In this paper, we consider the answers being criticized and their critique posts as controversial discussions in community Q&A sites. To help developers notice such controversial discussions and make more informed choices of appropriate solutions, we design an automatic open information extraction approach for systematically discovering and summarizing the controversies in Stack Overflow and exploiting official API documentation to assist the understanding of the discovered controversies.We apply our approach to millions of java/androidtagged Stack overflow questions and answers and discover a large scale of controversial discussions in Stack Overflow. Our manual evaluation confirms that the extracted controversy information is of high accuracy. A user study with 18 developers demonstrates the usefulness of our generated controversy summaries in helping developers avoid the controversial answers and choose more appropriate solutions to programming questions.

Xiaoxue Ren

Zhejiang University

Zhenchang Xing

Australia National University

Australia

Xin Xia

Monash University

Australia

Guoqiang Li

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

China

Jianling Sun

Zhejiang University

Previous studies showed that replying to a user review usually has a positive effect on the rating that is given by the user to the app. For example, Hassan et al. found that responding to a review increases the chances of a user updating their given rating by up to six times compared to not responding. To alleviate the labor burden in replying to the bulk of user reviews, developers usually adopt a template-based strategy where the templates can express appreciation for using the app or contain the company email for users to react. However, reading large numbers of user reviews every day is not an easy task for developers. The available review-response pairs provide us chances to learn the knowledge relations between reviews and responses.

Although there exists research on studying the popular review patterns (e.g., reviews with longer content and lower rating) that developers tend to respond, approaches to automate the review response process have never been proposed. Inspired by the RNN encoder-decoder model in the natural language processing field, we propose a response generation framework, named RRGen. RRGen explicitly incorporates review attributes, such as user rating and review length, and learns the relations between reviews and corresponding responses in a supervised way from the available training data. Experiments on 58 apps and 309,246 review-response pairs highlight that RRGen outperforms several baselines by 67.4% to 4.5 times in terms of BLEU (an accuracy measure that is widely used to evaluate generation systems). Qualitative analysis also confirms the effectiveness of RRGen in generating the relevant and accurate response.

Cuiyun Gao

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Singapore

Jichuan Zeng

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Xin Xia

Monash University

Australia

David Lo

Singapore Management University

Singapore

Michael Lyu

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Irwin King

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

Enabled by the pull-based development model, developers can easily contribute to a project through pull requests (PRs). When creating a PR, developers can add a free-form description to describe what changes made in this PR and/or why. Such a description is helpful for reviewers and other developers to gain a quick understanding of the PR without touching the details and may reduce the possibility of the PR being ignored or rejected. However, developers sometimes neglect to write descriptions for PRs. For example, in our collected dataset with over 333K PRs, more than 34% of the PR descriptions are empty. To alleviate this problem, we propose an approach to automatically generate PR descriptions based on the commit messages and the source code comments in the PRs. We regard this problem as a text summarization problem and solve it using a novel sequence-to-sequence model. To cope with out-of-vocabulary words in software artifacts and bridge the gap between the training loss function of the sequence-to-sequence model and the evaluation metric ROUGE, which has been shown to correspond to human evaluation, we integrate the pointer generator and directly optimize for ROUGE using reinforcement learning and a special loss function. We build a dataset with over 41K PRs and evaluate our approach on this dataset through ROUGE and a human evaluation. Our evaluation results show that our approach outperforms two baselines by significant margins.

Zhongxin Liu

Zhejiang University

China

Xin Xia

Monash University

Australia

Christoph Treude

The University of Adelaide

Australia

David Lo

Singapore Management University

Singapore

Shanping Li

Zhejiang University

With the advent of social media, developers are increasingly using it in their software development activities. Twitter is also one of the popular social mediums used by developers. A recent study by Singer et al. found that software developers use Twitter to “keep up with the fast-paced development landscape”. Unfortunately, due to the general purpose nature of Twitter, it’s challenging for developers to use Twitter for their development activities. Our survey with 36 developers who use Twitter in their development activities highlights that developers are interested in following specialized software gurus who share relevant technical tweets. To help developers perform this task, in this work we propose a recommendation system to identify specialized software gurus. Our approach first extracts different kinds of features that characterize a Twitter user and then employs a two-stage classification approach to generate a discriminative model, which can differentiate specialized software gurus in a particular domain from other Twitter users that generate domainrelated tweets (aka domain-related Twitter users). We have investigated the effectiveness of our approach in finding specialized software gurus for four different domains (JavaScript, Android, Python, and Linux) on a dataset of 86,824 Twitter users who generate 5,517,878 tweets over one month. Our approach can differentiate specialized software experts from other domain-related Twitter users with an F-measure of up to 0.820. Compared with existing Twitter domain expert recommendation approaches, our proposed approach can outperform their F-measure by at least 7.63%.

Abhishek Sharma

Singapore Management University, Singapore

Yuan Tian

Queens University, Kingston, Canada

Canada

Agus Sulistya

School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University

Dinusha Wijedasa

School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University

David Lo

Singapore Management University

Singapore

Evidence shows that developer reputation is extremely important when accepting pull requests or resolving reported issues. It is particularly salient in Free/Libre Open Source Software since the developers are distributed around the world, do not work for the same organization and, in most cases, never meet face to face. The existing solutions to expose developer reputation tend to be forge specific (GitHub), focus on activity instead of impact, do not leverage social or technical networks, and do not correct often misspelled developer identities. We aim to remedy this by amalgamating data from all public Git repositories, measuring the impact of developer work, expose developer’s collaborators, and correct notoriously problematic developer identity data. We leverage World of Code (WoC), a collection of an almost complete (and continuously updated) set of Git repositories by first allowing developers to select which of the 34 million(M) Git commit author IDs belong to them and then generating their profiles by treating the selected collection of IDs as that single developer. As a side-effect, these selections serve as a training set for a supervised learning algorithm that merges multiple identity strings belonging to a single individual. As we evaluate the tool and the proposed impact measure, we expect to build on these findings to develop reputation badges that could be associated with pull requests and commits so developers could easier trust and prioritize them.

Sadika Amreen

University of Tennessee Knoxville

Andrey Karnauch

University of Tennessee Knoxville

Audris Mockus

University of Tennessee - Knoxville

United States

Coding convention plays an important role in guaranteeing software quality. However, coding conventions are usually informally presented and inconvenient for programmers to use. In this paper, we present CocoQa, a system that answers programmer’s questions about coding conventions. CocoQa answers questions by querying a knowledge graph for coding conventions. It employs 1) a subgraph matching algorithm that parses the question into a SPARQL query, and 2) a machine comprehension algorithm that uses an end-to-end neural network to detect answers from searched paragraphs. We have imple- mented CocoQa, and evaluated it on a coding convention QA dataset. The results show that CocoQa can answer questions about coding conventions precisely. In particular, CocoQa can achieve a precision of 82.92% and a recall of 91.10%. Repository: https://github.com/14dtj/CocoQa/ Video: https://youtu.be/VQaXi1WydAU

Tianjiao Du

Shanghai JiaoTong University

Junming Cao

Shanghai JiaoTong University

Qinyue Wu

Shanghai JiaoTong University

Wei Li

Shanghai JiaoTong University

Beijun Shen

School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Yuting Chen

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

China