An Exploration of npm Package Co-Usage Examples from Stack Overflow: A Case Study
This is an incremental study for software developers facing challenges with third-party package maintenance.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding how npm package co-usage information from Stack Overflow can aid developers, finding that popular libraries are less discussed but accepted answers contain reusable examples and commands.
Third-party package usage has become a common practice in contemporary software development. Developers often face different challenges, including choosing the right libraries, installing errors, discrepancies, setting up the environment, and building failures during software development. The risks of maintaining a third-party package are well known, but it is unclear how information from Stack Overflow (SO) can be useful. This paper performed an empirical study to explore npm co-usage in SO. From over 30,000 SO posts, we extracted 2,100 SO posts related to npm and matched them to 217,934 npm library packages. We find that, popular and highly used libraries are not discussed as often in SO. However, we can see that the accepted answers may prove useful, as we believe that the usage examples and executable commands could be reused for tool support.