Making your programming questions be answered quickly: A content oriented study to technical Q&A forum

Abstract

Online programming forums enable programming knowledge sharing across organizational boundaries. Understanding how questions are asked and answered in forums will not only help developer to access the knowledge they need fast but bring important design implications. We report a study of Q&A process on MSDN's visual C# general forum. This study is content oriented instead of conventional social factor analysis to Communities of Q&A. We identified eight topic categories through two-round card sorting.We also explored various content feature's influence to Q&A process. A qualitative analysis was performed to identify different life-cycle patterns of questions. These findings highlight the role of content features, and the interaction effects between them. Based on these findings, we make a set of suggestions to information seekers on how to make their questions be answered faster, and derive implications for technical forums design and operation. To verify our findings, we also conducted a small replication to a Java technical forum and compared the results.