Similarities in Challenges faced by Developers: Investigations on Stack Overflow and GitHub

Abstract

A large amount of rich data available in today’s world encounters a lot of opportunities to analyze the data and identify some valuable patterns from them. However, dealing with such data requires automated frameworks and knowledge of programming languages. The most common and widely used programming languages among developers are Java and Python, as evident from the queries and issues posted on Stack Overflow and GitHub. Despite the popularity of both Java and Python, the challenges in transitioning from one technology to another technology are hard for individuals and industries. In this paper, we aim to investigate similarities in the challenges faced by developers while dealing with both programming languages. To achieve this goal, we formulated two research questions (RQs) for understanding the topics and issues asked and faced by developers. We have also identified the temporal trend of asking new questions on Stack Overflow for Java and Python programming languages (PLs). Our results revealed the changing trend, from 2015 onwards, from Java to Python and inclined towards Python from the number of new posts on Stack Overflow. We analyzed 18,892 Stack Overflow questions related to Java and Python PLs and 42,674 issues from 22 different GitHub repositories, 11 for each PL. Our results indicate that questions asked on Stack Overflow are co-related to issues posted by developers on GitHub during real-time development for a respective PL.