research Archives - Stack Overflow Blog

the-loop April 16, 2020

The Loop: Feedback Frameworks

After speaking with subject matter experts, we decided to take a step back. In this post, we list and organize our methods of feedback into a matrix. The goal is to offer a clear framework to follow and to identify areas that could use bolstering with alternative methods.

Sara Chipps Director of Product, Community - Former

the-loop January 22, 2020

The Loop #2: Understanding Site Satisfaction, Summer 2019

We’re excited to share research highlights about the work we’ve been doing to understand how satisfied people are with Stack Overflow. We’ve been working hard to explore what users like best about Stack Overflow and what their top pain points are, with the goal of improving the overall experience of using the site. To this end, we’ve launched a site satisfaction survey, in which we continually survey users about their experiences using Stack Overflow.

The Community Team

promotion December 17, 2019

Forrester Consulting TEI study shows 179% return on investment with Stack Overflow for Teams

Knowing our value and quantifying our value are two different things. Which is why we commissioned Forrester to conduct a T.E.I. (total economic impact) study. They sat down with four of our enterprise-sized customers and dug deep.

Megan Dorcey

code-for-a-living December 2, 2019

Preventing the Top Security Weaknesses Found in Stack Overflow Code Snippets

Last week, we told you about research that found a number of security vulnerabilities in code snippets in Stack Overflow answers, and how some of those flaws had migrated into actual, real-live Github projects. Today, we’re following up on the top eight error types that research highlighted and suggesting ways to avoid making the same mistakes.

Ryan Donovan

code-for-a-living November 26, 2019

Copying code from Stack Overflow? You might paste security vulnerabilities, too

Copying code itself isn’t always a bad thing. Code reuse can promote efficiency in software development; why solve a problem that has already been solved well? But when the developers use example code without trying to understand the implications of it, that’s when problems can arise.

Ryan Donovan

code-for-a-living November 7, 2019

Looking to understand which API is best for a certain task? A new study uses Stack Overflow data to rank them

But if you could collect and analyze the opinions posted within the comments and questions, you could start to get a bead on the aggregate sentiment, sort of a Yelp for technology. That’s just what Gias Uddin, now a Senior Data Scientist at the Bank of Canada, looked at for his PhD thesis at McGill University. Along with his PhD supervisor, Foutse Khomh, Associate Professor at Polytechnique Montréal, determined a method to mine opinions on APIs and libraries from questions and comments posted on Stack Overflow.

Ryan Donovan

code-for-a-living July 30, 2019

Find Help Online Mindfully — and Effectively!

Here’s a situation that might sound familiar: you’re in the middle of a project, and you realize you’re tackling a problem you haven’t seen before. Perhaps your search function query is returning too many results, which is slowing down your website. You figure you shouldn’t display the data all at once, and you’ve heard about…

Max Pekarsky Software Engineer