TL;DR
This study provides evidence-based guidelines for writing effective questions on Stack Overflow, emphasizing clarity, presentation, and emotional neutrality to improve the likelihood of receiving successful answers.
Contribution
It introduces a comprehensive framework analyzing factors influencing question success and validates guidelines through quantitative and qualitative analysis of over 87,000 questions.
Findings
Successful questions are short and contain code snippets.
Neutral emotional tone correlates with higher success rates.
Question quality impacts answer likelihood regardless of user reputation.
Abstract
Context: The success of Stack Overflow and other community-based question-and-answer (Q&A) sites depends mainly on the will of their members to answer others' questions. In fact, when formulating requests on Q&A sites, we are not simply seeking for information. Instead, we are also asking for other people's help and feedback. Understanding the dynamics of the participation in Q&A communities is essential to improve the value of crowdsourced knowledge. Objective: In this paper, we investigate how information seekers can increase the chance of eliciting a successful answer to their questions on Stack Overflow by focusing on the following actionable factors: affect, presentation quality, and time. Method: We develop a conceptual framework of factors potentially influencing the success of questions in Stack Overflow. We quantitatively analyze a set of over 87K questions from the…
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