DiffTech: A tool for differencing similar technologies from question-and-answer discussions

Abstract

Developers can use different technologies for different software development tasks in their work. However, when faced with several technologies with comparable functionalities, it can be challenging for developers to select the most appropriate one, as trial and error comparisons among such technologies are time-consuming. Instead, developers resort to expert articles, read official documents or ask questions in Q&A sites for technology comparison. However, it is still very opportunistic whether they will get a comprehensive comparison, as online information is often fragmented, contradictory and biased. To overcome these limitations, we propose the DiffTech system that exploits the crowd sourced discussions from Stack Overflow, and assists technology comparison with an informative summary of different comparison aspects. We found 19,118 comparative sentences from 2,410 pairs of comparable technologies. We released our DiffTech website for public use. Our website attracts over 1800 users and we also receive some positive comments on social media. A walkthrough video of the tool demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixX41DXRNsI Website link: https://difftech.herokuapp.com/