How Do OSS Developers Reuse Architectural Solutions From Q&A Sites: An Empirical Study

IF 5.6 1区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Pub Date : 2025-03-21 DOI:10.1109/TSE.2025.3572027

Musengamana Jean de Dieu;Peng Liang;Mojtaba Shahin

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Developers reuse programming-related knowledge (e.g., code snippets) on Q&A sites (e.g., Stack Overflow) that functionally matches the programming problems they encounter in their development. Despite extensive research on Q&A sites, being a high-level and important type of development-related knowledge, architectural solutions (e.g., architecture tactics) and their reuse are rarely explored. To fill this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods study that includes a mining study and a survey study. For the mining study, we mined 984 commits and issues (i.e., 821 commits and 163 issues) from 893 Open-Source Software (OSS) projects on GitHub that explicitly referenced architectural solutions from Stack Overflow (SO) and Software Engineering Stack Exchange (SWESE). For the survey study, we identified practitioners involved in the reuse of these architectural solutions and surveyed 227 of them to further understand how practitioners reuse architectural solutions from Q&A sites in their OSS development. Our main findings are that: (1) OSS practitioners reuse architectural solutions from Q&A sites to solve a large variety (15 categories) of architectural problems, wherein Component design issue, Architectural anti-pattern, and Security issue are dominant; (2) Seven categories of architectural solutions from Q&A sites have been reused to solve those problems, among which Architectural refactoring, Use of frameworks, and Architectural tactic are the three most reused architectural solutions; (3) OSS developers often rely on ad hoc ways (e.g., informal, improvised, or unstructured approaches) to reuse architectural solutions from SO, drawing on personal experience and intuition rather than standardized or systematic practices; (4) Reusing architectural solutions from SO comes with a variety of challenges, e.g., OSS practitioners complain that they need to spend significant time to adapt such architectural solutions to address design concerns raised in their OSS development, and it is challenging to reuse architectural solutions that are not tailored to the design context of their OSS projects. Our findings pave the way for future research directions, including the design and development of approaches and tools (such as IDE plugin tools) to facilitate the reuse of architectural solutions from Q&A sites, and could also be used to offer guidelines to practitioners when they contribute architectural solutions to Q&A sites. Our dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10936098.

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开源软件开发者如何重用来自问答网站的架构解决方案：一项实证研究

开发人员在问答网站（例如Stack Overflow）上重用与编程相关的知识（例如，代码片段），这些知识在功能上与他们在开发中遇到的编程问题相匹配。尽管对Q&A站点进行了广泛的研究，但作为与开发相关的高级和重要的知识类型，架构解决方案（例如，架构策略）及其重用很少被探索。为了填补这一空白，我们进行了一项混合方法研究，包括采矿研究和调查研究。对于挖掘研究，我们从GitHub上的893个开源软件（OSS）项目中挖掘了984个提交和问题（即821个提交和163个问题），这些项目明确引用了堆栈溢出（SO）和软件工程堆栈交换（SWESE）的架构解决方案。对于调查研究，我们确定了参与这些架构解决方案重用的实践者，并调查了其中的227人，以进一步了解实践者如何在他们的OSS开发中重用来自问答站点的架构解决方案。我们的主要发现是：(1)OSS从业者重用来自问答站点的体系结构解决方案来解决大量（15类）体系结构问题，其中组件设计问题、体系结构反模式和安全问题占主导地位；(2)来自问答网站的7类架构解决方案被重用来解决这些问题，其中架构重构、框架使用和架构策略是重用最多的三种架构解决方案；(3) OSS开发人员经常依赖特别的方法（例如，非正式的、临时的或非结构化的方法）来重用SO中的体系结构解决方案，利用个人经验和直觉，而不是标准化或系统的实践；(4)重用来自SO的体系结构解决方案带来了各种各样的挑战，例如，OSS从业者抱怨他们需要花费大量的时间来适应这样的体系结构解决方案，以解决在他们的OSS开发中提出的设计问题，并且重用没有根据他们的OSS项目的设计上下文定制的体系结构解决方案是具有挑战性的。我们的发现为未来的研究方向铺平了道路，包括方法和工具（如IDE插件工具）的设计和开发，以促进问答网站架构解决方案的重用，也可以用来为从业者提供指导，当他们向问答网站贡献架构解决方案时。我们的数据集可以在https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10936098上公开获取。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 工程技术-工程：电子与电气

CiteScore

9.70

自引率

10.80%

发文量

724

审稿时长

6 months

期刊介绍： IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering seeks contributions comprising well-defined theoretical results and empirical studies with potential impacts on software construction, analysis, or management. The scope of this Transactions extends from fundamental mechanisms to the development of principles and their application in specific environments. Specific topic areas include: a) Development and maintenance methods and models: Techniques and principles for specifying, designing, and implementing software systems, encompassing notations and process models. b) Assessment methods: Software tests, validation, reliability models, test and diagnosis procedures, software redundancy, design for error control, and measurements and evaluation of process and product aspects. c) Software project management: Productivity factors, cost models, schedule and organizational issues, and standards. d) Tools and environments: Specific tools, integrated tool environments, associated architectures, databases, and parallel and distributed processing issues. e) System issues: Hardware-software trade-offs. f) State-of-the-art surveys: Syntheses and comprehensive reviews of the historical development within specific areas of interest.