arXiv subjects

In-on Wiratsin

Publications and source records attributed to In-on Wiratsin.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

An Empirical Study of Java Code Improvements Based on Stack Overflow Answer Edits

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the accumulation of this suboptimal code leads to significant maintenance costs and technical debt. Developers frequently consult external knowledge bases, such as API documentation and Q&A websites like Stack Overflow (SO), to aid their programming tasks. SO's crowdsourced, collaborative nature has created a vast repository of programming knowledge. Its community-curated content is constantly evolving, with new answers posted or existing ones edited. In this paper, we present an empirical study of SO Java answer edits and their application to improving code in open-source projects. We use a modified code clone search tool to analyze SO code snippets with version history and apply it to open-source Java projects. This identifies outdated or unoptimized code and suggests improved alternatives. Analyzing 140,840 Java accepted answers from SOTorrent and 10,668 GitHub Java projects, we manually categorized SO answer edits and created pull requests to open-source projects with the suggested code improvements. Our results show that 6.91% of SO Java accepted answers have more than one revision (average of 2.82). Moreover, 49.24% of the code snippets in the answer edits are applicable to open-source projects, and 11 out of 36 proposed bug fixes based on these edits were accepted by the GitHub project maintainers.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Do Stack Overflow Answer Edits Occur Beyond Java? A Replication on Python and JavaScript

Stack Overflow answers are continually revised by the community, and the edits made to their code snippets are a potential source of improvements for code that has been reused in open-source projects. A recent empirical study established this for Java, reporting that 16.11% of accepted Java answers are edited and that the resulting recommendations concentrate in highly popular GitHub projects. Whether that behaviour is a property of Stack Overflow or a property of the Java community has remained an open question. We replicate the study on Python and JavaScript, the two most widely used languages alongside Java, applying the same SOTorrent-based extraction pipeline, the same clone search tool, Siamese+, and the same project popularity criteria. Analysing 840,132 accepted Python answers and 1,144,185 accepted JavaScript answers, we find that 41.25% and 39.10% respectively have been edited at least once, roughly two and a half times the Java rate, while the number of revisions per edited answer is almost invariant across the three languages at 2.78, 2.68 and 2.82. Searching 100 GitHub projects per language, we find that the number of matched answer edits increases monotonically from low- to medium- to high-popularity projects in both languages, from 80 to 156 to 977 for Python and from 32 to 71 to 353 for JavaScript. The difference is statistically significant for Python but not for JavaScript. The central findings of the original study therefore generalise beyond Java, with the supply of candidate improvements considerably larger in both replication languages than in the original.

cs.SE↗