Conversation in forums: How software forum posts discuss potential development insights

IF 3.7 2区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Journal of Systems and Software Pub Date : 2024-05-24 DOI:10.1016/j.jss.2024.112108

Hechen Wang, Peter Devine, James Tizard, Seyed Reza Shahamiri, Kelly Blincoe

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

User feedback on software usage is utilised by developers to improve their software. Software product forums are platforms rich in software-related user feedback, such as forum threads containing bug reports or requests for new features. However, previous studies have mainly focused on analysing user feedback from software product forums as individual sentences, which can lead to missing insights and a lack of understanding of the overall context of forum posts. To fill this gap in research, this work examines user feedback found in software product forum posts to investigate the differences between content classifications found in forum sentences and posts. We manually evaluated software product forum posts collected from two open-sourced software product forums and discovered five new types of user feedback that can only be identified when examining user feedback in the form of forum posts. Additionally, we examined the association between sentence classifications found within software product forums. Our results indicate that contextual information complimenting product improvement insights can be found in software product forums, with a confidence of 0.75 and 0.69 for the association between apparent bug and application usage sentences. This information can be used to reduce manual efforts required to chase up missing contextual information when attempting to understand or fix software issues. We also provide insights into the progression of posts in software product forums at the thread-level, and our progression flowchart can be used to summarise the sequence of events in software product forum threads. Our findings reveal the importance of looking at user feedback within software product forums in the format of forum posts to identify new insights on user feedback for software improvements.

Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.

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论坛中的对话：软件论坛帖子如何讨论潜在的开发见解

用户对软件使用情况的反馈被开发人员用来改进软件。软件产品论坛是富含与软件相关的用户反馈的平台，例如包含错误报告或新功能请求的论坛主题。然而，以往的研究主要侧重于分析软件产品论坛中作为单个句子的用户反馈，这可能会导致洞察力缺失，并且缺乏对论坛帖子整体语境的理解。为了填补这一研究空白，本研究对软件产品论坛帖子中的用户反馈进行了研究，以探讨论坛句子和帖子内容分类之间的差异。我们对从两个开源软件产品论坛收集到的软件产品论坛帖子进行了人工评估，发现了五种新的用户反馈类型，这些类型只有在研究论坛帖子形式的用户反馈时才能识别。此外，我们还研究了软件产品论坛中发现的句子分类之间的关联。我们的研究结果表明，在软件产品论坛中可以找到与产品改进见解相辅相成的上下文信息，明显的错误和应用程序使用句子之间的置信度分别为 0.75 和 0.69。在试图理解或修复软件问题时，这些信息可用于减少人工查找缺失的上下文信息的工作量。我们还深入分析了软件产品论坛中线程级帖子的进展情况，我们的进展流程图可用于总结软件产品论坛线程中的事件顺序。我们的研究结果揭示了在软件产品论坛中以论坛帖子的形式查看用户反馈的重要性，从而为改进软件找出用户反馈的新见解。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Systems and Software 工程技术-计算机：理论方法

CiteScore

8.60

自引率

5.70%

发文量

193

审稿时长

16 weeks

期刊介绍： The Journal of Systems and Software publishes papers covering all aspects of software engineering and related hardware-software-systems issues. All articles should include a validation of the idea presented, e.g. through case studies, experiments, or systematic comparisons with other approaches already in practice. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: • Methods and tools for, and empirical studies on, software requirements, design, architecture, verification and validation, maintenance and evolution • Agile, model-driven, service-oriented, open source and global software development • Approaches for mobile, multiprocessing, real-time, distributed, cloud-based, dependable and virtualized systems • Human factors and management concerns of software development • Data management and big data issues of software systems • Metrics and evaluation, data mining of software development resources • Business and economic aspects of software development processes The journal welcomes state-of-the-art surveys and reports of practical experience for all of these topics.