What Do Firebase Developers Discuss About? An Empirical Study on Stack Overflow Posts

Abstract

Firebase is the leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution in the application development industry. It is globally used by millions of mobile applications and websites. Being a very popular and robust development platform, Firebase has introduced and developed many features and components over the years. Various services and modules are being added to the platform. So, the developers who use Firebase in their applications, need to have versatile knowledge of the platform. It is difficult to acquire an overview of the trends and discussions of any vast and dynamic platform such as Firebase. Therefore, learners, enthusiasts, and often developers have to put in a lot of effort to figure out topics they should explore and focus on. As a large number of application developers frequently use it and engage in various discussions about it in popular community discussion forums for developers, it has become a very promising source for identifying the topics and trends related to Firebase. Stack Overflow is the most popular community for developers’ discussions. It has grown to be a vast ocean of knowledge to explore. In this study, a systematic approach is followed to explore, extract, and analyze Stack Overflow discussions on Firebase to present an overview of the platform. Natural language processing and machine learning methods were used for extracting information from Stack Overflow data. Information collected was reviewed, analyzed, and compiled into this paper by the research group who have practical experiences in the Firebase platform and other relevant software engineering fields.