Hearing the Voice of Developers in Mobile Software Ecosystems
Awdren Fontão, Fabrício Lima, Bruno Ábia, Rodrigo Pereira dos Santos, Arilo Claudio Dias‐Neto · 2017
In a Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO), there is no direct communication between the organizations that maintain mobile platforms (e.g. Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and developers to solve technical questions. Thus, Q&A repositories can serve as a mechanism to understand and define strategies to support developers. In this paper, we mined 13,515,636 posts from Stack Overflow by identifying 1,568,377 questions related to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone platforms. Next, we performed comparisons among those three MSECOs regarding: (i) developers' activity intensity, (ii) hot-topics (using Latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm) in all and more commented/viewed questions, and (iii) relationship among questions and official developer events. From the results, we identified four key insights: recruiting, educating, and monitoring strategies; barrier reduction; management of technology insertion; and fostering of relationships.