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

Yi Li, Shaohua Wang, Tien N. Nguyen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2020 ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering
Subtitle of host publicationCompanion, ICSE-Companion 2020
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages318-319
Number of pages2
ISBN (Electronic)9781450371223
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2020
Event42nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion, ICSE-Companion 2020 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of
Duration: Jun 27 2020Jul 19 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2020 ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion, ICSE-Companion 2020

Conference

Conference42nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion, ICSE-Companion 2020
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CitySeoul
Period6/27/207/19/20

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

Keywords

  • API documentation
  • Question answering

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