An Empirical Study on the Characteristics of Question-Answering Process on Developer Forums

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

10-1-2020

Abstract

Developer forums are one of the most popular and useful QA websites on API usages. The analysis of API forums can be a critical step towards automated question and answer approaches. In this poster, we empirically study three API forums: Twitter, eBay, and AdWords, to investigate the characteristics of question-answering process. We observe that +60% of the posts on all forums were answered with API method names or documentation. +85% of the questions were answered by API development teams and the answers from API development teams drew fewer follow-up questions. Our results provide empirical evidence in future work to build automated solutions to answer developer questions on API forums.

Identifier

85098585481 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9781450371223]

Publication Title

Proceedings 2020 ACM IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Companion ICSE Companion 2020

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1145/3377812.3390897

First Page

318

Last Page

319

Grant

CCF-1518897

Fund Ref

National Science Foundation

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