Interests, Difficulties, Sentiments, and Tool Usages of Concurrency Developers: A Large-Scale Study on Stack Overflow

TL;DR

This large-scale study analyzes Stack Overflow questions to understand the interests, difficulties, sentiments, and tool usage of concurrency developers, providing insights to improve practice, research, and education in concurrent software development.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive hierarchy of concurrency topics, analyzes developer sentiments and difficulties, and relates these findings to prior research, guiding future efforts.

Findings

Concurrency questions form a hierarchy with 27 topics under 8 categories

Thread safety is highly popular; client-server concurrency is less popular

Irreproducible behavior is very difficult; memory consistency is less difficult

Abstract

Context: Software developers are increasingly facing the challenges of writing code that is not only concurrent but also correct. Objective: To help these developers, it is necessary to understand concurrency topics they are interested in, their difficulty in finding answers for questions in these topics, their sentiment for these topics, and how they use concurrency tools and techniques to guarantee correctness. Method: We conduct a large-scale study on the entirety of Stack Overflow to understand interests, difficulties, sentiment, and tool usages of concurrency developers. We discuss the implications of our findings for the practice, research, and education of concurrent software development, and investigate the relation of our findings with the findings of the previous work. Results: A few findings of our study are: (1) questions that concurrency developers ask can be grouped into a hierarchy with 27 concurrency topics under 8 major categories, (2) thread safety is among the most popular concurrency topics and client-server concurrency is among the least popular, (3) irreproducible behavior is among the most difficult topics and memory consistency is among the least difficult, (4) data scraping is among the most positive concurrency topics and irreproducible behavior is among the most negative, (5) root cause identification has the most number of questions for usage of data race tools and alternative use has the least. Conclusion: The results of our study can not only help concurrency developers but also concurrency educators and researchers to better decide where to focus their efforts, by trading off one concurrency topic against another.