Understanding the social evolution of the Java community in Stack Overflow: A 10-year study of developer interactions

Abstract

Today, Social Media is a key information source for a wide range of domains as a means to gain a better understanding of information flows and user communities. This work introduces a methodology combining machine learning and graph mining approaches to address relevant aspects of quality of service and user intrinsic motivation from the user's perspective. The focus of the present analysis is set on the social interactions among software developers via Stack Overflow. Over the last 10 years, software developers have become intensively involved in knowledge sharing and platforms such as Stack Overflow have accumulated a lot of development data and knowledge. The proposed methodology is applied to explore the social dynamics of the Java programming language community and bring forward relevant, non-trivial knowledge about developer interests, information flows and user engagement and reputation. The ultimate aim is to improve question preparation towards better question routing and voting outcome.