Hot Topics and Common Challenges: an Empirical Study of React Discussions on Stack Overflow

TL;DR

This paper analyzes React-related questions on Stack Overflow to identify common challenges, error types, and user-reputation patterns, providing insights to support developers in overcoming implementation difficulties.

Contribution

It introduces an exploratory data analysis of React questions on Stack Overflow, focusing on keyword frequency, error classification, and user reputation, which is a novel approach.

Findings

Algorithmic errors are the most common issue across user groups.

Mid-reputation users contribute over half of the questions.

Top keywords include code, link, href, and connect.

Abstract

React is a JavaScript library used to build user interfaces for single-page applications. Although recent studies have shown the popularity and advantages of React in web development, the specific challenges users face remain unknown. Thus, this study aims to analyse the React-related questions shared on Stack Overflow. The study utilizes an exploratory data analysis to investigate the most frequently discussed keywords, error classification, and user reputation-based errors, which is the novelty of this work. The results show the top eight most frequently used keywords on React-related questions, namely, code, link, vir, href, connect, azure, windows, and website. The error classification of questions from the sample shows that algorithmic error is the most frequent issue faced by all groups of users, where mid-reputation users contribute the most, accounting for 55.77%. This suggests the need for the community to provide guidance materials in solving algorithm-related problems. We expect that the results of this study will provide valuable insight into future research to support the React community during the early stages of implementation, facilitating their ability to effectively overcome challenges to adoption.