Finding Help with Programming Errors: An Exploratory Study of Novice Software Engineers’ Focus in Stack Overflow Posts

Finding Help with Programming Errors: An Exploratory Study of Novice Software Engineers’ Focus in Stack Overflow Posts

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  Finding Help withProgramming Errors: An Exploratory Study of Novice Software Engineers’ Focus in Stack Overflow Posts Preetha Chatterjee Minji Kong Lori Pollock Journal of Systems and Software (JSS), Volume 159, Jan 2020 Asst. Prof. [Fall ’21] Ph.D.
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  Stack Overflow Usage:Statistics and Challenges 40% participants are novice programmers (< 5 yrs experience) who struggle to find relevant information from a Stack Overflow post!! Information Overload: The top 5 Stack Overflow questions for a sample query “Differences Hashmap Hashtable Java”, consist of 51 answers which have 6,771 words in total [Xu et. al. 2017] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 We aim to understand: How novice software engineers direct their efforts and what kinds of information they focus on within a Stack Overflow post
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  Study Design RQ1. Challenges- What slows a novice software engineer down in identifying the solution most appropriate for their problem? RQ2. Focus - Which parts of a post novice software engineers focus on to reduce their time in locating information?
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  RQ1 Findings: DeveloperChallenges Survey Question 69% participants indicated “Too much text containing unnecessary details” 51% participants indicated “Determining embedded code segment relevance” 39% indicated “Too much code containing unnecessary details”
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  Question Title: Polymorphismin Java error: cannot find Symbol I've just started learning object oriented programming from the book head first java. It said that polymorphism enables me to create an array of the superclass type and then have all the subclasses as the array elements. But when I tried writing code using the same principles it ran into error saying error: cannot find symbol I made the classes the superclass was animal and the dog class extended the animal class having a fetch method of its own, but when I referenced the dog variable as animal it did not work here is the code … The error tester.java:4: error: cannot find symbol doggie.fetch(); symbol: method fetch() location: variable doggie of type animal When using polymorphism, if you create an instance of the subclass and store its reference in a variable of superclass type, you can only call those methods on the newly created instance which are present in the super class. In your code, you created an instance of dog class and stored its reference in doggie which is of type animal (super class of dog), In such case, you can't call any method on dog class instance that isn't available in animal class. fetch method is not defined in the animal class hence you get the error. Either define the fetch method in the animal class OR Change animal doggie = new dog(); to dog doggie = new dog(); Developer’s Goal Developer’s Pertinent Action System Symptom Accepted Answer Symptom Cause Posted Solution Solution Justification RQ2 Findings: Developer Focus
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  • Too muchtext including unnecessary details (69%) • Determining embedded code segment relevance (51%) • Too much code including unnecessary details (39%) Developer’s Goal Developer’s Pertinent Action System Symptom Symptom Cause Posted Solution Solution Justification Novice software engineers pay attention to only 27% code and 15-21% of text in a SO post! @PreethaChatterj preethac@udel.edu sites.udel.edu/preethac/ Significance:  improve the Q&A forum interface  guide tools for mining forums  improve granularity of traceability mappings involving forum posts Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2019.110454 Summary and Overview RQ1. Challenges - What slows a novice software engineer down in identifying the solution most appropriate for their problem? RQ2. Focus - Which parts of a post novice software engineers focus on to reduce their time in locating information?