This article appears in the proceedings of the IEEE 37th International Conference on Software Engineering.
Professor of Computing Sciences Megan Squire published “Should We Move to Stack Overflow? Measuring the Utility of Social Media for Developer Support” at the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering, held at the Fiera Firenze (Florence, Italy) May 20-22, 2015.
This competitively-refereed article features the use of data mining techniques to answer the practical question of where to locate software development support services. To answer this question, Squire harvested more than 190 million records from the popular programmer web site Stack Overflow, and then compared the response time and participation rates on this site compared to older social media technology (mailing lists and web forums). She discovered that response time is much faster on Stack Overflow, but the verdict on whether participation rates are higher is mixed.
The full citation of the paper is as follows:
Squire, M. (2015). “Should We Move to Stack Overflow?” Measuring the Utility of Social Media for Developer Support. In Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015). IEEE. May 20-22. Florence, Italy.