An Exploration of npm Package Co-Usage Examples from Stack Overflow: A Case Study

Abstract

Third-party package usage has become a common practice in contemporary software development. Developers often face different challenges, including choosing the right libraries, installing errors, discrepancies, setting up the environment, and building failures during software development. The risks of maintaining a third-party package are well known, but it is unclear how information from Stack Overflow (SO) can be useful. This paper performed an empirical study to explore npm package co-usage examples from SO. From over 30,000 SO question posts, we extracted 2,100 posts with package usage information and matched them against the 217,934 npm library package. We find that, popular and highly used libraries are not discussed as often in SO. However, we can see that the accepted answers may prove useful, as we believe that the usage examples and executable commands could be reused for tool support.

An Empirical Study of npm Ecosystem Related Tweets by Core Software Developers: A Case Study

“…In addition, question-type tweets are significant in a bug report (25.8%), usage scenario (22.4%), feature request (21.9%), etc. This finding aligns with our previous study 15 . It appears that core npm developers use Twitter more for technical issues (such as package management) than for community-centric events and activities.…”

“…These prior studies show that Twitter posts are useful to understand software developers' challenges. In our previous empirical studies, we looked at the software packaging ecosystem-related discussions by developers on question-and-answering sites and found that package management issues are the biggest challenge [13][14][15] . However, no study has been conducted so far to examine the tweets shared by developers to reveal the challenges associated with using the software packaging ecosystem and how they differ from question-and-answer sites.…”

“…Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms among developers to stay informed about fast-paced developments in the development landscape, to learn from others, and to build relationships 11,12 . In a series of empirical studies, we looked at the software packaging ecosystemrelated discussions by developers on question-and-answering sites and found that package management issues are the biggest challenge [13][14][15] . However, no study has been conducted that examines the tweets shared by developers to determine the challenges that developers face, including the topic of discussion, nature and sentiments associated with using software packaging ecosystems, as well as how they differ from question-and-answer sites.…”

An empirical study of software ecosystem related tweets by npm maintainers

“…This information may prove useful to new developers when it comes to following npm maintainers on Twitter who are interested in specific aspects of software development. These findings align with our previous studies Islam et al (2021 , 2022 , 2023) regarding package management issues of software ecosystem. From RQ 2 , we find that npm maintainers who believe Twitter is an important tool for their development activities use a variety of strategies, with information tweets dominating, followed by question and answer.…”

“…To address these challenges, developers have become increasingly dependent on various online platforms such as social media ( Guzman, Alkadhi & Seyff, 2017 ; Gonzalez-Marron, Mejia-Guzman & Enciso-Gonzalez, 2017 ) and question-and-answer sites ( Meldrum, Licorish & Savarimuthu, 2017 ; Chakraborty et al, 2021 ) since these networks have become mainstream communication channels. In a series of empirical studies, we examined the discussion related to the software ecosystem by developers on question-and-answer sites and found that package management issues are the biggest challenge ( Islam et al, 2021 , 2022 , 2023 ). On the other hand, the software developers community heavily relies on Twitter’s features for communication and sharing information, with noticeable variations in its usage among different groups ( Fang, Vasilescu & Herbsleb, 2023 ).…”