Understanding Developers' Contribution Motivation in Stack Overflow: A Systematic Review

Motivations are vital for developers to choose and remain in developer question and answering (Q&A) communities to maintain the prosperity of these communities. Hence, they have been investigated by many researchers in the past decade. However, a systematic research overview has yet to be performed in this domain, leaving a fragmented picture of developers' motivations for participating in these communities. To fill this gap, this work (1) groups developer motivations from multiple data sources by a deep text clustering method, (2) statistically identifies determining factors of developers, and (3) analyzes the regulation styles of the motivation determinants based on the self-determination theory. Taking Stack Overflow as the research context, this study collected 134 motivations from 41 related research. With the motivations collected, this study took them into seventeen clusters. The centres of eight were considered the determining factors: reputation, badge, getting information, learning, reciprocity, helping others, obtaining privileges, and fun. These motivational determinants fall under five regulation styles, from intrinsic to extrinsic. The findings presented a systematic picture of developers' motivations for participating in Stack Overflow and can help researcher and practitioners optimize strategies to stimulate developers to build sustainable online communities.