SOTorrent: Reconstructing and Analyzing the Evolution of Stack Overflow Posts — Supplementary Material

Stack Overflow is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of code snippets and free-form text on a wide variety of topics. Like other software artifacts, questions and answers on Stack Overflow evolve over time, for example when bugs in code snippets are fixed, code is updated to work with a more recent library version, or text surrounding a code snippet is edited for clarity. To be able to analyze how content on Stack Overflow evolves, we built SOTorrent, an open dataset based on the official Stack Exchange data dump. SOTorrent provides access to the version history of Stack Overflow content at the level of whole posts and individual text or code blocks.

This dataset has been retrieved from SOTorrent using the following scripts:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1201679

For the MSR 2018 paper about SOTorrent, we used the following scripts to analyze the data:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1201706

The files sample_before_10.ods and sample_after_10.ods contain our qualitative analysis of 50 comments that were made up to 10 minutes before/after an edit.