An Insight into the Unresolved Questions at Stack Overflow

Abstract: For a significant number of questions at Stack Overflow, none of the posted answers were accepted as solutions. Acceptance of an answer indicates that the answer actually solves the discussed problem in the question, and the question is answered sufficiently. In this paper, we investigate 3,956 such unresolved questions using an exploratory study where we analyze four important aspects of those questions, their answers and the corresponding users that partially explain the observed scenario. We then propose a prediction model by employing five metrics related to user behaviour, topics and popularity of question, which predicts if the best answer for a question at Stack Overflow might remain unaccepted or not. Experiments using 8,057 questions show that the model can predict unresolved questions with 78.70% precision and 76.10% recall.

Experimental Data

Related Publication(s)

• M. Masudur Rahman and C.K. Roy, "An Insight into the Unresolved Questions at Stack Overflow", In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories ( MSR 2015), pp. 426--429, Florence, Italy, May 2015

@INPROCEEDINGS{msrch2015masud, 
author={M. M. Rahman and C. K. Roy}, 
booktitle={ Proc. MSR}, 
title={An Insight into the Unresolved Questions at Stack Overflow}, 
year={2015}, 
pages={426-429} } 

← Check out other tools by Masud Rahman

© Masud Rahman, Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.