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Mining Questions Asked about Continuous Software Engineering: A Case Study of Stack Overflow

Published: 17 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Context: With the growing popularity of rapid software delivery and deployment, the methods, practices and technologies of Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) are evolving steadily. This creates the need for understanding the recent trends of the technologies, practitioners' challenges and views in this domain. Objective: In this paper, we present an empirical study aimed at exploring CSE from the practitioners' perspective by mining discussions from Q&A websites. Method: We have analyzed 12,989 questions and answers posted on Stack Overflow. Topic modelling is conducted to derive the dominant topics in this domain. Further, a qualitative analysis was conducted to identify the key challenges discussed. Findings: Whilst the trend of posted questions is sharply increasing, the questions are becoming more specific to technologies and more difficult to attract answers. We identified 32 topics of discussions, among which "Error messages in Continuous Integration/Deployment" and "Continuous Integration concepts" are the most dominant. We also present the most challenging areas in this domain from the practitioners' perspectives.

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
EASE '20: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
April 2020
544 pages
ISBN:9781450377317
DOI:10.1145/3383219
  • General Chairs:
  • Jingyue Li,
  • Letizia Jaccheri,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Torgeir Dingsøyr,
  • Ruzanna Chitchyan
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • NTNU: Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. continuous deployment
  2. continuous integration
  3. continuous software engineering
  4. mining software repositories
  5. qualitative analysis
  6. stack overflow
  7. topic modelling

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EASE '20

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Overall Acceptance Rate 71 of 232 submissions, 31%

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Cited By

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  • (2023)A data-driven framework for knowledge exchange analysis of development issues in medical applications: A case study of COVID-192023 49th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA60479.2023.00065(386-393)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Understanding Software Performance Challenges an Empirical Study on Stack Overflow2023 International Conference on Code Quality (ICCQ)10.1109/ICCQ57276.2023.10114662(1-15)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2023
  • (2023)A mixed method study of DevOps challengesInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107244161(107244)Online publication date: Sep-2023
  • (2023)Revolutionizing software developmental processes by utilizing continuous software approachesThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-023-05818-880:7(9579-9608)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2023
  • (2023)From DevOps to DevSecOps is not enough. CyberDevOps: an extreme shifting-left architecture to bring cybersecurity within software security lifecycle pipelineSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-023-09619-331:2(619-654)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Insights into software development approaches: mining Q &A repositoriesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10417-529:1Online publication date: 23-Nov-2023
  • (2022)COVID-Vis: Visualizing knowledge exchange on scientific software development in the COVID-19 eraProceedings of the 26th Pan-Hellenic Conference on Informatics10.1145/3575879.3576019(367-372)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Challenges and solutions when adopting DevSecOpsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106700141:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2022
  • (2021)Characteristics and Challenges of Low-Code DevelopmentProceedings of the 15th ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)10.1145/3475716.3475782(1-11)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2021
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