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ICSE 2021
Mon 17 May - Sat 5 June 2021

Developer chatrooms (e.g., the Gitter platform) are gaining popularity as a communication channel among developers. In developer chatrooms, a developer (asker) posts questions and other developers (respondents) respond to the posted questions. The interaction between askers and respondents results in a discussion thread. Recent studies show that developers use chatrooms to inquire about issues, discuss development ideas, and help each other. However, prior work focuses mainly on analyzing individual messages of a chatroom without analyzing the discussion thread in a chatroom. Developer chatroom discussions are context-sensitive, entangled, and include multiple participants which make it hard to accurately identify threads. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of the Gitter platform (i.e., developer chatrooms) by analyzing 6,605,248 messages of 709 chatrooms. To analyze the characteristics of the posted questions and the impact on the response behavior (e.g., whether the posted questions get responses), we propose an approach that identifies discussion threads in chatrooms with high precision (i.e., 0.81 F-score). The analysis of the identified results shows that inactive members responded more often and unique questions take longer discussion time than simple questions.

Wed 26 May

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

20:40 - 21:40
2.6.2. Q&A in Online Platforms: Stack Overflow #1Journal-First Papers / Technical Track at Blended Sessions Room 2 +12h
Chair(s): Francisco Servant Virginia Tech
20:40
20m
Paper
Reading Answers on Stack Overflow: Not Enough!Journal-First
Journal-First Papers
Haoxiang Zhang Centre for Software Excellence, Huawei, Canada, Shaowei Wang University of Manitoba, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen Concordia University, Ahmed E. Hassan School of Computing, Queen's University
Pre-print Media Attached
21:00
20m
Paper
An Empirical Study of Developer Discussions in the Gitter PlatformJournal-First
Journal-First Papers
Osama Ehsan Queen's University, Canada, Safwat Hassan Thompson Rivers University, Mariam El Mezouar Royal Military College, Ying Zou Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
Pre-print Media Attached
21:20
20m
Paper
Automatic Extraction of Opinion-based Q&A from Online Developer ChatsTechnical Track
Technical Track
Preetha Chatterjee University of Delaware, Kostadin Damevski Virginia Commonwealth University, Lori Pollock University of Delaware
Pre-print Media Attached

Thu 27 May

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

08:40 - 09:40
2.6.2. Q&A in Online Platforms: Stack Overflow #1Journal-First Papers / Technical Track at Blended Sessions Room 2
08:40
20m
Paper
Reading Answers on Stack Overflow: Not Enough!Journal-First
Journal-First Papers
Haoxiang Zhang Centre for Software Excellence, Huawei, Canada, Shaowei Wang University of Manitoba, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen Concordia University, Ahmed E. Hassan School of Computing, Queen's University
Pre-print Media Attached
09:00
20m
Paper
An Empirical Study of Developer Discussions in the Gitter PlatformJournal-First
Journal-First Papers
Osama Ehsan Queen's University, Canada, Safwat Hassan Thompson Rivers University, Mariam El Mezouar Royal Military College, Ying Zou Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
Pre-print Media Attached
09:20
20m
Paper
Automatic Extraction of Opinion-based Q&A from Online Developer ChatsTechnical Track
Technical Track
Preetha Chatterjee University of Delaware, Kostadin Damevski Virginia Commonwealth University, Lori Pollock University of Delaware
Pre-print Media Attached