SOTorrent Data Set 2017-07-25

Stack Overflow (SO) is the largest Q&A website for software developers, providing a huge amount of copyable code snippets. Recent studies have shown that developers regularly copy those snippets into their software projects, often without the required attribution. Beside possible licensing issues, maintenance issues may arise, because the snippets evolve on SO, but the developers who copied the code are not aware of these changes. To help researchers investigate the evolution of code snippets on SO and their relation to other platforms like GitHub, we build SOTorrent, an open data set based on data from the official SO data dump and the Google BigQuery GitHub data set. SOTorrent provides access to the version history of SO content on the level of whole posts and individual text or code blocks. Moreover, it links SO content to external resources in two ways: (1) by extracting linked URLs from text blocks of SO posts and (2) by providing a table with links to SO posts found in the source code of all projects in the BigQuery GitHub data set