Characterizing User Behaviors in Open-Source Software User Forums: An Empirical Study

TL;DR

This empirical study analyzes 1.3 million posts in OSS user forums to understand end-user behaviors, revealing their dominant role in initiating and responding to threads, despite lower confidence levels, and highlighting their positive emotional engagement.

Contribution

The paper provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of end-user participation in OSS forums, emphasizing their significant contribution and emotional positivity compared to other user types.

Findings

End-users initiate over 86-96% of threads.

End-users are key responders in forums.

End-users show more positive emotions than developers and organizers.

Abstract

User forums of Open Source Software (OSS) enable end-users to collaboratively discuss problems concerning the OSS applications. Despite decades of research on OSS, we know very little about how end-users engage with OSS communities on these forums, in particular, the challenges that hinder their continuous and meaningful participation in the OSS community. Many previous works are developer-centric and overlook the importance of end-user forums. As a result, end-users' expectations are seldom reflected in OSS development. To better understand user behaviors in OSS user forums, we carried out an empirical study analyzing about 1.3 million posts from user forums of four popular OSS applications: Zotero, Audacity, VLC, and RStudio. Through analyzing the contribution patterns of three common user types (end-users, developers, and organizers), we observed that end-users not only initiated most of the threads (above 96% of threads in three projects, 86% in the other), but also acted as the significant contributors for responding to other users' posts, even though they tended to lack confidence in their activities as indicated by psycho-linguistic analyses. Moreover, we found end-users more open, reflecting a more positive emotion in communication than organizers and developers in the forums. Our work contributes new knowledge about end-users' activities and behaviors in OSS user forums that the vital OSS stakeholders can leverage to improve end-user engagement in the OSS development process.