Enhancing Technical Q&A Forums with CiteHistory

author: Adam Fourney, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
published: April 3, 2014,   recorded: July 2013,   views: 1605
Categories

Related content

Report a problem or upload files

If you have found a problem with this lecture or would like to send us extra material, articles, exercises, etc., please use our ticket system to describe your request and upload the data.
Enter your e-mail into the 'Cc' field, and we will keep you updated with your request's status.
Lecture popularity: You need to login to cast your vote.
  Delicious Bibliography

Description

Software engineers often use Q&A forums like Stack Overflow and MSDN to ask and answer technical questions. Through a survey study and web browser log analysis, we find that both askers and answerers of technical forum questions typically conduct extensive online research before composing their posts. The inclusion of links to these research materials is beneficial to the forum participants, though post authors do not always include such citations. Based on these findings, we developed CiteHistory, a browser plugin that simplifies the process of including relevant search queries and URLs as bibliographic supplements to forum posts, and supports information re-finding for post authors. We discuss the results of a two-week deployment of CiteHistory with professional software engineers, which demonstrated that CiteHistory increased reference inclusion in posts, and offered auxiliary benefits as a personal research tracker.

Link this page

Would you like to put a link to this lecture on your homepage?
Go ahead! Copy the HTML snippet !

Write your own review or comment:

make sure you have javascript enabled or clear this field: