Mining Technology Landscape from Stack Overflow

The sheer number of available technologies and the complex relationships among them make it challenging to choose the right technologies for software projects. Developers often turn to online resources (e.g., expert articles and community answers) to get a good understanding of the technology landscape. Such online resources are primarily opinion-based and are often out of date. Furthermore, information is often scattered in many online resources, which has to be aggregated to have a big picture of the technology landscape. In this paper, we exploit the fact that Stack Overflow users tag their questions with the main technologies that the questions revolve around, and develop association rule mining and community detection techniques to mine technology landscape from Stack Overflow question tags. The mined technology landscape is represented in a graphical Technology Associative Network (TAN). Our empirical study shows that the mined TAN captures a wide range of technologies, the complex relationships among the technologies, and the trend of the technologies in the developers' discussions on Stack Overflow. We develop a website (https://graphofknowledge.appspot.com/) for the community to access and evaluate the mined technology landscape. The website visit statistics by Google Analytics shows the developers' general interests in our technology landscape service. We also report a small-scale user study to evaluate the potential usefulness of our tool.