TechLand: Assisting Technology Landscape Inquiries with Insights from Stack Overflow

Understanding the technology landscape is crucial for the success of the software-engineering project or organization. However, it can be difficult, even for experienced developers, due to the proliferation of similar technologies, the complex and often implicit dependencies among technologies, and the rapid development in which technology landscape evolves. Developers currently rely on online documents such as tutorials and blogs to find out best available technologies, technology correlations, and technology trends. Although helpful, online documents often lack objective, consistent summary of the technology landscape. In this paper, we present the TechLand system for assisting technology landscape inquiries with categorical, relational and trending knowledge of technologies that is aggregated from millions of Stack Overflow questions mentioning the relevant technologies. We implement the TechLand system and evaluate the usefulness of the system against the community answers to 100 technology questions on Stack Overflow and by field deployment and a lab study. Our evaluation shows that the TechLand system can assist developers in technology landscape inquiries by providing direct, objective, and aggregated information about available technologies, technology correlations and technology trends.