Automatically locating relevant programming help online

While maintaining software systems, developers often encounter compilation errors and runtime exceptions that they do not know how to solve. Solutions to these errors can often be found through discussions with other developers on the Internet. Unfortunately, many of these online discussions do not contain relevant answers. We have developed an approach to automatically query and analyze online discussions to locate relevant solutions to programming problems. Our tool, called Dora, is integrated into Visual Studio and allows developers to query and evaluate solutions within their development environment, enabling them to reduce context switching between their development tasks and their search sessions. We have performed a semi-controlled experiment to validate the utility of our search approach with 18 tasks, finding that our approach provides 55% more relevant results than traditional web searching approaches.