An Empirical Study on the Characteristics of Question-Answering Process on Developer Forums

Developer forums are one of the most popular and useful Q&A websites on API usages. The analysis of API forums can be a critical step towards automated question and answer approaches. In this poster, we empirically study three API forums: Twitter, eBay, and AdWords, to investigate the characteristics of question-answering process. We observe that +60% of the posts on all forums were answered with API method names or documentation. +85% of the questions were answered by API development teams and the answers from API development teams drew fewer follow-up questions. Our results provide empirical evidence in future work to build automated solutions to answer developer questions on API forums.