An Empirical Study on the Characteristics of Question-Answering Process on Developer Forums
This provides empirical insights for building automated Q&A tools for developer forums, but it is incremental as it focuses on characterizing existing processes.
The study analyzed three API forums (Twitter, eBay, AdWords) to understand question-answering patterns, finding that over 60% of posts were answered with API method names or documentation and over 85% by API development teams, which led to fewer follow-up questions.
Developer forums are one of the most popular and useful Q&A websites on API usages. The analysis of API forums can be a critical resource for the automated question and answer approaches. In this paper, we empirically study three API forums including Twitter, eBay, and AdWords, to investigate the characteristics of question-answering process. We observe that +60% of the posts on all three forums were answered by providing 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 evidences for us in a future work to build automated solutions to answer developer questions on API forums.