一句话：实证研究 Discord 中重复开发者问题，并评估自动建议历史对话和帖子对回答的帮助性。
软件开发者常需查找编码任务相关问题的答案，而许多问题在此前聊天或其他在线社区中已被回答。本文首先通过实证分析探索 Discord 聊天平台上重复问题的频率，并评估自动识别这些重复问题的方法。随后，作者与真实开发者开展现场实验，在四个 Discord 社区中为开发者发布的 277 个问题提供帮助性建议，获得 142 个帮助性评分，并通过 53 份问卷和 10 次后续访谈收集定性反馈。结果显示，建议在 40% 的情况下被认为有帮助；建议 Stack Overflow 帖子通常比建议过去的 Discord 对话更有帮助；开发者难以将问题表述为搜索查询，因此更倾向于在线社区中用自然语言描述问题。
A big part of software developers' time is spent finding answers to their coding-task-related questions. To answer their questions, developers usually perform web searches, ask questions on Q&A websites, or, more recently, in chat communities. Yet, many of these questions have frequently already been answered in previous chat conversations or other online communities. Automatically identifying and then suggesting these previous answers to the askers could, thus, save time and effort. In an empirical analysis, we first explored the frequency of repeating questions on the Discord chat platform and assessed our approach to identify them automatically. The approach was then evaluated with real-world developers in a field experiment, through which we received 142 ratings on the helpfulness of the suggestions we provided to help answer 277 questions that developers posted in four Discord communities. We further collected qualitative feedback through 53 surveys and 10 follow-up interviews. We found that the suggestions were considered helpful in 40% of the cases, that suggesting Stack Overflow posts is more often considered helpful than past Discord conversations, and that developers have difficulties describing their problems as search queries and, thus, prefer describing them as natural language questions in online communities.
@inproceedings{paperbot11258,
title = {On the Helpfulness of Answering Developer Questions on Discord with Similar Conversations and Posts from the Past},
author = {Alexander Lill and André N. Meyer and Thomas Fritz},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1145/3597503.3623341}
}