Understanding Geographical Trends in Stack Overflow Code Maintenance Discussions – Replication Package

Code maintenance is a critical endeavour that impacts the longevity of software systems, encompassing corrective, adaptive, perfective, and preventive maintenance practices as established in IEEE standards. Yet research mostly investigates discrete aspects of software maintenance, such as refactoring challenges and technical debt accumulation, limiting the general understanding of how code maintenance is discussed. Our study investigates code maintenance discussions on Stack Overflow as a medium for the software engineering community, examining how temporal patterns, topic distributions, and technology associations vary across continents. This replication package is provided for those interested in further examining our research methodology.