Why, when, and what: analyzing stack overflow questions by topic, type, and code

Miltiadis Allamanis, Charles Sutton

Abstract: Questions from Stack Overflow provide a unique opportunity to gain insight into what programming concepts are the most confusing. We present a topic modeling analysis that combines question concepts, types, and code. Using topic modeling, we are able to associate programming concepts and identifiers (like the String class) with particular types of questions, such as, “how to perform encoding”.