Software technologies skills: A graph-based study to capture their associations and dynamics

Software design and development technologies evolve very fast and in unpredicted rates, posing many challenges for programmers who strive to use them properly and to be up-to-date, especially since software development demands teamwork and collaboration. As a result, Question and Answer (Q&A) sites, like Stack Overflow, have seen large growth. The questions are characterized by tags, which support developers to easily trace their topic of interest. Very often, these tags refer to technologies that are connected or serve the same purpose. This work is motivated by the fact that despite the volume of questions and technologies change over time, tags inter-connections carry insightful information since they can be utilized to monitor the technology trends and their dynamics given technologies fast simultaneous evolution over time. This work recognizes the value of such connections, to reveal associations of technologies and to support the scientific community, which can be highly inspired by this study, using advanced data analysis tools. Benefits of the present study include early notification of the labor market needs, competency discovery and directions for educational planning. In the present study, graph theory principles and tools were employed to profile chronologically the evolution and the associations of technologies related to tags, and the experimentation carried out has involved the entire set of Stack Overflow questions posted during a decade, between 2008 and 2018. Very interesting conclusions are summarized based on the tags related to Computer Science Technologies (Hard Skills) analysis, revealing non-evident software technologies skills, associations and dynamics.