How do API changes trigger stack overflow discussions? a study on the Android SDK

Mario Linares-Vásquez, Gabriele Bavota, Massimiliano Di Penta, Rocco Oliveto, Denys Poshyvanyk
2014 Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Program Comprehension - ICPC 2014  
The growing number of questions related to mobile development in StackOverflow highlights an increasing interest of software developers in mobile programming. For the Android platform, 213,836 questions were tagged with Android-related labels in StackOverflow between July 2008 and August 2012. This paper aims at investigating how changes occurring to Android APIs trigger questions and activity in StackOverflow, and whether this is particularly true for certain kinds of changes. Our findings
more » ... est that Android developers usually have more questions when the behavior of APIs is modified. In addition, deleting public methods from APIs is a trigger for questions that are (i) more discussed and of major interest for the community, and (ii) posted by more experienced developers. In general, results of this paper provide important insights about the use of social media to learn about changes in software ecosystems, and establish solid foundations for building new recommenders for notifying developers/managers about important changes and recommending them relevant crowdsourced solutions.
doi:10.1145/2597008.2597155 dblp:conf/iwpc/VasquezBPOP14 fatcat:3il53nb46bdztdwsqcsiatpa2a