A comparative study of FAQs for software development

Abstract

Developers use FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) to access and share knowledge about software libraries, APIs, and platforms. This paper studies 2,660 questions from 43 FAQ websites. We analyzed accessibility metrics such as the steps from the main documentation page, tagging or multilingualism as well as structure and readability metrics such as code-to-text ratio, number of links, and Flesch Reading-Ease. In addition, we compared these FAQs to 69,548 Stack Overflow (SO) posts, which cover the same topics and which have been posted by developers at least twice (i.e. duplicates). Our results reveal that different software vendors give different importance to their FAQs, e.g. by investing more effort or less in structuring and presenting them. We found that studied FAQs include more references (e.g. to corresponding API documentation) and are more verbose and difficult to read than corresponding SO duplicates. We also found that FAQs cover additional topics compared to corresponding duplicate posts.