How do API changes trigger stack overflow discussions? A study on the android SDK

Abstract

The growing number of questions related to mobile development in StackOverow highlights an increasing interest of software developers in mobile programming. For the Android platform, 213,836 questions were tagged with Android-related labels in StackOverow 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 suggest 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.