StackDoc - A Stack Overflow Plug-in for Novice Programmers that Integrates Q&A with API Examples

Abstract

There is a tremendous increase in the use of online coding platforms, courses and walkthrough tutorials to learn programming today. Stack Overflow, a Q&A website of crowd-sourced knowledge on programming is one of the popular platforms that developers and learners use to ask and answer Q&As related to programming. However, novice programmers often face difficulties in understanding the answers as they may contain new terminologies, function calls and attributes of certain technology or programming language. Researchers have proposed different ways to augment Stack Overflow in the literature, but to the best of our knowledge, there is no work that exists to augment Stack Overflow posts with definitions of API calls and relevant examples. To this end, we propose StackDoc, a prototype plug-in that augments Stack Overflow with definitions and examples of API calls in the questions and answers with the goal of helping novice programmers. We did a preliminary survey with 20 students of various universities, novice to Java and 85% of the users reported positive experience with the plugin.