Intuition vs. Truth: Evaluation of Common Myths about StackOverflow Posts
Verena Honsel, Steffen Herbold, Jens Grabowski · 2015
Posting and answering questions on Stack Overflow (SO) is everyday business for many developers. We asked a group of developers what they expect to be true about questions and answers on SO. Most of their expectations were related to the likelihood of getting an answer or to voting behavior. From their comments, we formulated nine myths that they think are true about the platform. Then, we proceeded to use rather simple methods from statistics to check if these myths are supported by the data in the SO dump provided. Through our analysis, we determined that there is an effect for eight of the nine myths the developers believed in. However, for only four of the myths the effect size is large enough to actually make a difference. Hence, we could bust five myths the developers believed in.