Analyzing Comment-Induced Updates on Stack Overflow

Abstract

Stack Overflow is home to a large number of technical questions and answers. These answers also include comments from the community and other users about the answer's validity. Such comments may point to flaws in the posted answer or may indicate deprecated code that is no longer valid due to API changes. In this paper, we explore how comments affect answer updates on Stack Overflow, using the SOTorrent dataset. Our results show that a large number of answers on Stack Overflow are not updated, even when they receive comments that warrant an update. Our results can be used to build recommender systems that automatically identify answers that require updating, or even automatically update answers as needed.