Context – During the development of complex software systems, programmers look for external resources to understand better how to use specific APIs and to get advice related to their current tasks. Stack Overflow provides developers with a broader insight into API usage as well as useful code examples. Given the circumstances, tools and techniques for mining Stack Overflow are highly desirable. Objective – In this paper, we introduce PostFinder, an approach that analyzes the project under development to extract suitable context, and allows developers to retrieve messages from Stack Overflow being relevant to the API function calls that have already been invoked. Method – PostFinder augments posts with additional data to make them more exposed to queries. On the client side, it boosts the context code with various factors to construct a query containing information needed for matching against the stored indexes. Multiple facets of the data available are used to optimize the search process, with the ultimate aim of recommending highly relevant SO posts. Results – The approach has been validated utilizing a user study involving a group of 12 developers to evaluate 500 posts for 50 contexts. Experimental results indicate the suitability of PostFinder to recommend relevant Stack Overflow posts and concurrently show that the tool outperforms a well-established baseline. Conclusions – We conclude that PostFinder can be deployed to assist developers in selecting relevant Stack Overflow posts while they are programming as well as to replace the module for searching posts in a code-to-code search engine.

背景信息–在开发复杂的软件系统时，程序员会寻找外部资源，以更好地了解如何使用特定的API并获得有关其当前任务的建议。Stack Overflow为开发人员提供了对API使用以及有用的代码示例的更广泛的了解。在这种情况下，非常需要用于挖掘Stack Overflow的工具和技术。目标–在本文中，我们介绍PostFinder，该方法可以分析正在开发的项目以提取合适的上下文，并允许开发人员从Stack Overflow中检索与已经调用的API函数相关的消息。方法 -PostFinder通过附加数据来扩展帖子，使它们更易于查询。在客户端，它通过各种因素来增强上下文代码，以构造一个查询，其中包含与存储的索引进行匹配所需的信息。可用数据的多个方面用于优化搜索过程，最终目的是推荐高度相关的SO帖子。结果–该方法已通过一项涉及12个开发人员的用户研究得到验证，该评估研究针对50个情况评估了500个帖子。实验结果表明PostFinder适合推荐相关的Stack Overflow帖子，同时表明该工具的性能优于公认的基准。结论– 我们得出的结论是，可以部署PostFinder来帮助开发人员在编程时选择相关的Stack Overflow帖子，并替换代码搜索引擎中用于搜索帖子的模块。