Mining testing questions on stack overflow

Abstract

During software maintenance, testing is a crucial activity to ensure the quality of code as it evolves over time. With the increasing size and complexity of software, adequate software testing has become increasingly important. Developers often ask problems they face during testing on Community Question Answering (CQA) websites such as Stack Overflow. These websites can serve as good repositories to understand the common topics of discussions and challenges faced by developers during testing. In this paper, we present a study of common challenges and important topics of discussion, by mining testing related questions asked on Stack Overflow. We use unsupervised learning to categorize the questions and rank all the Stack Overflow questions based on their importance. Our results show that topics such as test framework, database and client server are more often discussed compared to other topics. Also, there has been an uptrend for mobile development questions in testing related discussions.