Student Experiences with GitHub and Stack Overflow: An Exploratory Study

Programmers who want to improve their skills in software development rely heavily on developer social platforms such as GitHub and Stack Overflow to enhance their learning. Stack Overflow provides answers to questions they have about languages or library skills they wish to acquire, while contributing to open-source projects hosted on sites like GitHub gives them valuable experience. Students also use these platforms during their education: most will rely heavily on Stack Overflow at some point in their schooling, while many can benefit from contributing to GitHub projects to build their expertise and professional portfolios. We already know from previous research that developers face barriers participating on these platforms, so we may expect that at least some students will experience similar barriers and possibly even bigger challenges. This paper describes a semi-structured interview study with university students to explore how they use the GitHub and Stack Overflow platforms. We identify the barriers they face and benefits they report from using these tools. We conclude with some preliminary recommendations on how to reduce the hurdles students may face with these and other developer social platforms, and suggest future work to mitigate these roadblocks.