Do Mobile Developers Ask on Q&A Sites About Error Codes Thrown by a Cross-Platform App Development Framework? An Empirical Study

TL;DR

This empirical study investigates whether Xamarin mobile developers seek help on Q&A sites regarding framework error codes, revealing that many questions are asked and answered, which could aid developer support.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical analysis of Xamarin error code questions on Q&A sites, highlighting the potential for community-driven support.

Findings

Many Xamarin error-related questions are asked on Q&A sites.

Most questions about Xamarin errors receive at least one answer.

The information from Q&A sites could be useful for supporting Xamarin developers.

Abstract

During last years development frameworks have emerged to make easier the development and maintenance of cross-platform mobile applications. Xamarin framework is one of them: it takes as input an app written in C# and produces native code for Android, iOS and Windows Mobile platforms. When using Xamarin, developers can meet errors, identified with codes, thrown by the framework.Unfortunately, the Xamarin official documentation does not provide a complete description, solution or workaround for all those codes.In this paper, we analyze two sites of questions and answers related to Xamarin for finding questions that mention those error codes. We found in both sites that there are questions written by developers asking about Xamarin errors, and the majority of them have at least one answer. Our intuition is this discovered information could be useful for giving support to Xamarin developers.