Debugging with the Crowd: a Debug Recommendation System based on Stackoverflow

Debugging is a resource-consuming activity of software development. Some bugs are deeply rooted in the domain logic but others are independent of the specificity of the application being debugged. The latter are "crowd-bugs": unexpected and incorrect output or behavior resulting from a common and intuitive usage of an API. On the contrary, project-specific bugs are related to the misunderstanding or incorrect implementation of domain concepts or logics. We propose a debugging approach for crowd bugs, that is based on matching the piece of code being debugged against related pieces of code on a Q&A website (Stackoverflow). Based on the empirical study of Stackoverflow's data, we show that this approach can help developers to fix crowd bugs.

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Source https://hal.science/hal-00987395
Author Monperrus, Martin, Maia, Anthony
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 5, 2026, 12:05 (UTC)
Created May 5, 2026, 12:05 (UTC)
Identifier Report N°: hal-00987395
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Self-adaptation for distributed services and large software systems (SPIRALS) ; Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille (LIFL) ; Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Université de Lille, Sciences Humaines et Sociales-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Université de Lille, Sciences Humaines et Sociales-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Centre Inria de l'Université de Lille ; Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)
creator Monperrus, Martin
date 2014-05-05T00:00:00
harvest_object_id e519cdce-ac11-4605-8281-079badaee787
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2025-10-27T00:00:00
set_spec type:REPORT