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

TL;DR

This study empirically analyzes developer forums to understand question-answering behaviors, revealing that most answers involve API documentation and are provided by API teams, informing future automated Q&A solutions.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical analysis of question-answering patterns on developer API forums, highlighting key characteristics and response sources.

Findings

Over 60% of answers include API method names or documentation.

More than 85% of answers come from API development teams.

Answers from API teams generate fewer follow-up questions.

Abstract

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.