Abstract: 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.

Cite it:

Martin Monperrus and Anthony Maia, "Debugging with the Crowd: a Debug Recommendation System based on Stackoverflow", Technical report, Université Lille 1 - Sciences et Technologies hal-00987395, 2014.

\href{https://hal.science/hal-00987395/file/article.pdf}{Debugging with the Crowd: a Debug Recommendation System based on Stackoverflow} % \cite{monperrus:hal-00987395}

Bibtex Entry:

@techreport{monperrus:hal-00987395,
 title = {Debugging with the Crowd: a Debug Recommendation System based on Stackoverflow},
 author = {Monperrus, Martin and Maia, Anthony},
 url = {https://hal.science/hal-00987395/file/article.pdf},
 type = {Research Report},
 number = {hal-00987395},
 institution = {{Universit{\'e} Lille 1 - Sciences et Technologies}},
 year = {2014},
}