Understanding and evaluating the behavior of technical users. A study of developer interaction at StackOverflow

Abstract

This paper is focused on analyzing the details of one of the most widely used Q&A technical discussion forums on the Internet: StackOverflow. StackOverflow is a huge source of information for both academics and industry practitioners and its analysis can provide useful insights. This is evident by a growing body of work dedicated to the study of this platform. There are several papers that have taken the ‘platform’ as an analyzing point to gain a few useful insights into the practices adopted by software developers. However, different from current literature, the objective of this paper is to explore the habit of users, more specifically, we want to find out how do technical users behave online? In doing so, we attempt to present a new picture that focuses more on the human aspect of this online community. We neither focus on the technical aspects of the platform nor do we focus on the technical capabilities of developers, rather, the focus of this paper is to explore the humanistic point of view of technical users. To do that, we mine StackOverflow’s repositories to find a few patterns that raise several questions. The observations presented in this paper highlight real world implications of having open call based software engineering platforms. Further, we conduct a survey of StackOverflow users to find an answer to one of the highly talked about topics on Meta (a discussion forum for StackOverflow). The subject of the survey concerns changing participation habit of users. As the paper progresses forward, we discuss factors that raise the issue of professionalism and ethics at this online venue. The findings show several malpractices happening at StackOverflow. We present a detailed analysis and discuss these issues in this paper.

Domain problem‐solving expert identification in community question answering

“…Furtado, Oliveira, and Andrade (2014) summarized contributors into four types and proved that the majority of contribution in the communities are provided by activists and experts. Ahmed and Srivastava (2017) analysed the humanistic point of view of technical users and investigated the factors like locality and gender that play important role in CQA. The finding also showed that malpractices such as plagiarism were also common on Stack Overflow.…”

iTrustSO

“…There have been many works on knowledge discovery from Stack Overflow data [10], [20], [22], [5], [2] -from gamification motivation for voluntary contributions [5], discussion interest trend [20] to developer interaction [2] and repair patterns from extracted code samples [22]. However, most of these works have focused in Stack Overflow semantics and users behavior but rarely addressed the issue of code security analysis.…”

Stack Overflow – Informal learning and the global expansion of professional development and opportunities in programming?

“…Furthermore, those women who do have a user account typically post less questions and answers as well as having shorter active careers on the platform and achieving lower maximum reputation scores. One possible explanation for the continued underrepresentation of women on Stack Overflow that has been argued for is based on a general sociological assumption that people often interact more with those of their own gender [21,22]. While this argument could account for lower per capita levels of interaction in the form of questions, answers and comments for women, it does not account for the very low proportion of accounts [18] that have been identified as belonging to women.…”