Images are increasingly being shared by software developers in diverse channels including question-and-answer forums like Stack Overflow. Although prior work has pointed out that these images are meaningful and provide complementary information compared to their associated text, how images are used to support questions is empirically unknown. To address this knowledge gap, in this paper we specifically conduct an empirical study to investigate (I) the characteristics of images, (II) the extent to which images are used in different question types, and (III) the role of images on receiving answers. Our results first show that user interface is the most common image content and undesired output is the most frequent purpose for sharing images. Moreover, these images essentially facilitate the understanding of 68% of sampled questions. Second, we find that discrepancy questions are more relatively frequent compared to those without images, but there are no significant differences observed in description length in all types of questions. Third, the quantitative results statistically validate that questions with images are more likely to receive accepted answers, but do not speed up the time to receive answers. Our work demonstrates the crucial role that images play by approaching the topic from a new angle and lays the foundation for future opportunities to use images to assist in tasks like generating questions and identifying question-relatedness.

翻译：图像正越来越多地被软件开发者在各种渠道中共享，包括像 Stack Overflow 这样的问答论坛。尽管先前的研究指出这些图像是有意义的，并且与其相关文本相比提供了补充信息，但图像如何被用于支持提问，在经验上仍是未知的。为填补这一知识空白，本文特意开展了一项实证研究，以探究（I）图像的特征，（II）图像在不同类型问题中的使用程度，以及（III）图像在获得回答方面的作用。我们的结果首先表明，用户界面是最常见的图像内容，而不期望的输出则是分享图像最常见的目的。此外，这些图像基本上有助于理解68%的抽样问题。其次，我们发现，与没有图像的问题相比，差异性问题相对更常见，但在所有类型的问题中，描述长度并未观察到显著差异。第三，定量结果统计性地验证了，带有图像的问题更有可能获得被接受的答案，但并不会加快获得答案的时间。我们的工作通过从新的角度探讨这一主题，展示了图像发挥的关键作用，并为未来利用图像辅助完成诸如生成问题和识别问题相关性等任务奠定了基础。