"A Bit of Code": How the Stack Overflow Community Creates Quality Postings

Abstract

The Stack Overflow web site is an online community where programmers can ask and answer one another's questions, earning points and badges. The site offers guidance in the form of a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), beginning with “What kind of questions can I ask here?” The answer explains that “the best Stack Overflow questions have a bit of source code in them”. This paper explores the role of source code and non-source code text on Stack Overflow in both questions and answers. The primary contribution of this paper is to provide a more detailed understanding of whether the presence of source code (and how much) actually will produce the “best” Stack Overflow questions or answers. A second contribution of this paper is to determine how the non-code portions of the text might also contribute the “best” Stack Overflow postings.