Supporting governance of mobile application developers from mining and analyzing technical questions in stack overflow

Abstract

There is a need to improve the direct communication between large organizations that maintain mobile platforms (e.g. Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and third-party developers to solve technical questions that emerge during the project and development of developers' contributions in a Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO). In this context, those organizations may not know how to define and evolve strategies to govern their developers towards achieving their organizational goals. Such organizations use an infrastructure to support developers, for example, questions and answers (Q&A) portals such as Stack Overflow. Interactions among developers in these portals feed a Q&A repository that can serve as a mechanism to understand and define strategies to support developers. In this paper, we mined 1,568,377 technical questions from Stack Overflow related to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone platforms. Next, we performed comparisons among those MSECO regarding: (i) developers' activity intensity, (ii) hot-topics (using Latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm) from all and more commented/viewed questions, (iii) "What" and "How to" questions, (iv) hot-topics from more viewed unanswered questions, and (v) relationship among questions and official developer events. From the results, we identified four key insights: recruiting, educating, and monitoring strategies; barrier reduction; management of technology insertion; and fostering of relationships. The relevance of the four key insights to support developer governance was evaluated by practitioners through a survey. Finally, for each key insight we associated a total of 10 strategies to support developer governance activities. Such strategies were extracted from 65 studies identified through a systematic mapping of the literature. IntroductionIn Software Engineering, the relationship among mobile application developers and an organization responsible for a technological platform (keystone) which involves cooperation and competition has been investigated as a Software Ecosystem (SECO) (Bosch, 2009). In the mobile application (app) scenario, this context refers to a specific type of SECO, known as Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO) (Lin & Ye, 2009;Fontão et al., 2015). The developer is an essential actor to sustain MSECO contributions, such as apps and technical documentation (Fontão et al., 2016;Koch & Kerschbaum, 2014). Such contributions are usually stored in an official, internal MSECO repository, such as Android 1 and Apple 2 Developers repositories. Moreover, there are links between MSECO and external repositories, such as code (e.g. GitHub) (Casalnuovo et al., 2015) and questions and answers (Q&A) repositories. As an example of an external Q&A repository, Stack Overflow has a set of technical questions/answers that arise from the use of APIs, SDKs, and development tools (Ahmad et al., 2018). Such external repositories help to maintain the interaction among developers over a common platform, resulting in a set of contributions and influencing directly or indirectly the...

Java Geliştiricileri Stack Overflow Üzerinde Ne Hakkında Konuşuyor? Deneysel Bir Çalışma

“…There are studies on specific research technologies such as mobile development (Linares-Vásquez et al, 2013;Fontão et al, 2018), libraries of IOS and Android (W. Wang & Godfrey, 2013), security in development (Yang et al, 2016), Android testing (Villanes et al, 2017), concurrent programming (Ahmed & Bagherzadeh, 2018), and front-end technologies in web development (Bajaj, 2012). In these studies, the dataset is filtered.…”

“…Rosen & Shihab (2016) analyzed question types; they selected random questions from each platform at certain rates and classified questions manually as "what", "why" and "how". Fontão et al (2018) investigated whether the number of questions on the release date increased or not. They also examined questions including "what" and "how".…”

“…As a contribution to LDA, Yang et al (2016) tuned LDA with a genetic algorithm. A silhouette coefficient was used to detect the optimum topic number (Fontão et al, 2018 ;Villanes et al, 2017). Zou et al (2015) received support from four Ph.D. students to verify extracted topics manually.…”

Utilizando Ciência de Redes no Desenvolvimento de Sistemas Complexos

“…Um dos benefícios para uma empresa ou desenvolvedor se tornar um membro de um ECOS está na oportunidade de explorar a inovação aberta para que atores colaborem a fim de alcançar benefícios regionais e globais. O esforço dos atores externos em desenvolver para uma plataforma de ECOS pode transformar a inovação em algo positivo para si e seus clientes, contribuindo também para o centralizador por estender/melhorar a plataforma e engajar mais envolvidos [Fontão et al 2018]. A proximidade entre o centralizador e os atores externos é fundamental para o sucesso de um empreendimento de software em ECOS.…”

Toward Empirically Investigating Non-Functional Requirements of iOS Developers on Stack Overflow

“…Pinto and Kamei [38] investigated SO posts for categorizing posts related to some refactoring tools. Fontão et al [39] assessed 1,568,377 technical questions from SO those were related to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone platforms to identify the activity level of developers and hot topics discussed. In contrast, our work aims to identify the issues and most essential NFRs discussed only in iOS posts.…”