[Solved]: Empirical studies about benefits of Q&A sites for programming

Problem Detail: 

I'm looking for empirical papers which investigate if a user can benefit from Q&A sites like Stack Overflow. I welcome any papers related to this topic, e.g:

• an experiment, investigating if a specific task can be executed faster,
• an analysis, investigating if a user understands the solutions on Q&A sites or if he just does copy&paste without thinking about it,
• a comparative analysis of the code quality of users with access to Q&A sites in contrast to users without internet access (but just offline documentation of APIs).

Asked By : nico1510

Answered By : rla4

There was a presentation on ICSE 2011, at the New Ideas and Emerging Results track, entitled "How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web?". They only had initial results, but they sounded very interesting and promising. Maybe you could contact the authors if you need more info (they're from the Dept. of Comput. Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada). Here is the full reference:

Treude, C.; Barzilay, O.; Storey, M. How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web?. In Proc. of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2011.

UPDATE: This paper was just mentioned at the Stack Exchange blog:

Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude, Lars Grammel, Margaret-Anne Storey. Crowd Documentation: Exploring the Coverage and the Dynamics of API Discussions on Stack Overflow. Georgia Institute of Technology, Tech. Rep, 2012. [PDF]

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Question Source : http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/13056

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