Augmenting stack overflow with API usage patterns mined from GitHub

Anastasia Reinhardt, Tianyi Zhang, Mihir Mathur, Miryung Kim

Abstract: Programmers often consult Q&A websites such as Stack Overflow (SO) to learn new APIs. However, online code snippets are not always complete or reliable in terms of API usage. To assess online code snippets, we build a Chrome extension, ExampleCheck that detects API usage violations in SO posts using API usage patterns mined from 380K GitHub projects. It quantifies how many GitHub examples follow common API usage and illustrates how to remedy the detected violation in a given SO snippet. With ExampleCheck, programmers can easily identify the pitfalls of a given SO snippet and learn how much it deviates from common API usage patterns in GitHub. The demo video is at https://youtu.be/WOnN-wQZsH0.