Understanding and evaluating the behavior of technical users. A study of developer interaction at StackOverflow

Abstract

This paper is focused on analyzing the details of one of the most widely used Q&A technical discussion forums on the Internet: StackOverflow. StackOverflow is a huge source of information for both academics and industry practitioners and its analysis can provide useful insights. This is evident by a growing body of work dedicated to the study of this platform. There are several papers that have taken the ‘platform’ as an analyzing point to gain a few useful insights into the practices adopted by software developers. However, different from current literature, the objective of this paper is to explore the habit of users, more specifically, we want to find out how do technical users behave online? In doing so, we attempt to present a new picture that focuses more on the human aspect of this online community. We neither focus on the technical aspects of the platform nor do we focus on the technical capabilities of developers, rather, the focus of this paper is to explore the humanistic point of view of technical users. To do that, we mine StackOverflow’s repositories to find a few patterns that raise several questions. The observations presented in this paper highlight real world implications of having open call based software engineering platforms. Further, we conduct a survey of StackOverflow users to find an answer to one of the highly talked about topics on Meta (a discussion forum for StackOverflow). The subject of the survey concerns changing participation habit of users. As the paper progresses forward, we discuss factors that raise the issue of professionalism and ethics at this online venue. The findings show several malpractices happening at StackOverflow. We present a detailed analysis and discuss these issues in this paper. © 2017, The Author(s).