A systematic mapping study of crowd knowledge enhanced software engineering research using Stack Overflow
Minaoar Hossain Tanzil, Shaiful Chowdhury, Somayeh Modaberi, Gias Uddin, Hadi Hemmati · Journal of Systems and Software · 2025
Developers continuously interact in crowd-sourced community-based question-answer (Q&A) sites. Reportedly, ∼ 30% of all software professionals visit the most popular Q&A site StackOverflow (SO) every day. Software engineering (SE) research studies are also increasingly using SO data. To find out the trend, implication, impact, and future research potential utilizing SO data, a systematic mapping study needs to be conducted. Following a rigorous reproducible mapping study approach, from 18 reputed SE journals and conferences, we collected 384 SO-based research articles and categorized them into 10 facets (i.e., themes). We found that SO contributes to 85% of SE research compared with popular Q&A sites such as Quora, and Reddit. We found that 18 SE domains directly benefited from SO data whereas Recommender Systems , and API Design and Evolution domains use SO data the most (15% and 16% of all SO-based research studies, respectively). API Design and Evolution , and Machine Learning with/for SE domains have consistent upward publication. Deep Learning Bug Analysis and Code Cloning research areas have the highest potential research impact recently. With the insights, recommendations, and facet-based categorized paper list from this mapping study, SE researchers can find out potential research areas according to their interest to utilize large-scale SO data.