Hechen Wang, Peter Devine, James Tizard, Seyed Reza Shahamiri, Kelly Blincoe
{"title":"论坛中的对话:软件论坛帖子如何讨论潜在的开发见解","authors":"Hechen Wang, Peter Devine, James Tizard, Seyed Reza Shahamiri, Kelly Blincoe","doi":"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112108","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>User feedback on software usage is utilised by developers to improve their software. Software product forums are platforms rich in software-related user feedback, such as forum threads containing bug reports or requests for new features. However, previous studies have mainly focused on analysing user feedback from software product forums as individual sentences, which can lead to missing insights and a lack of understanding of the overall context of forum posts. To fill this gap in research, this work examines user feedback found in software product forum posts to investigate the differences between content classifications found in forum sentences and posts. We manually evaluated software product forum posts collected from two open-sourced software product forums and discovered five new types of user feedback that can only be identified when examining user feedback in the form of forum posts. Additionally, we examined the association between sentence classifications found within software product forums. Our results indicate that contextual information complimenting product improvement insights can be found in software product forums, with a confidence of 0.75 and 0.69 for the association between apparent bug and application usage sentences. This information can be used to reduce manual efforts required to chase up missing contextual information when attempting to understand or fix software issues. We also provide insights into the progression of posts in software product forums at the thread-level, and our progression flowchart can be used to summarise the sequence of events in software product forum threads. Our findings reveal the importance of looking at user feedback within software product forums in the format of forum posts to identify new insights on user feedback for software improvements.</p><p><em>Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board</em>.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51099,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Systems and Software","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224001535/pdfft?md5=0b4a756ac3f9ca9d2d70448deb6b44f2&pid=1-s2.0-S0164121224001535-main.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Conversation in forums: How software forum posts discuss potential development insights\",\"authors\":\"Hechen Wang, Peter Devine, James Tizard, Seyed Reza Shahamiri, Kelly Blincoe\",\"doi\":\"10.1016/j.jss.2024.112108\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<div><p>User feedback on software usage is utilised by developers to improve their software. Software product forums are platforms rich in software-related user feedback, such as forum threads containing bug reports or requests for new features. However, previous studies have mainly focused on analysing user feedback from software product forums as individual sentences, which can lead to missing insights and a lack of understanding of the overall context of forum posts. To fill this gap in research, this work examines user feedback found in software product forum posts to investigate the differences between content classifications found in forum sentences and posts. We manually evaluated software product forum posts collected from two open-sourced software product forums and discovered five new types of user feedback that can only be identified when examining user feedback in the form of forum posts. Additionally, we examined the association between sentence classifications found within software product forums. Our results indicate that contextual information complimenting product improvement insights can be found in software product forums, with a confidence of 0.75 and 0.69 for the association between apparent bug and application usage sentences. This information can be used to reduce manual efforts required to chase up missing contextual information when attempting to understand or fix software issues. We also provide insights into the progression of posts in software product forums at the thread-level, and our progression flowchart can be used to summarise the sequence of events in software product forum threads. Our findings reveal the importance of looking at user feedback within software product forums in the format of forum posts to identify new insights on user feedback for software improvements.</p><p><em>Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board</em>.</p></div>\",\"PeriodicalId\":51099,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Journal of Systems and Software\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":3.7000,\"publicationDate\":\"2024-05-24\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224001535/pdfft?md5=0b4a756ac3f9ca9d2d70448deb6b44f2&pid=1-s2.0-S0164121224001535-main.pdf\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Journal of Systems and Software\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"94\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224001535\",\"RegionNum\":2,\"RegionCategory\":\"计算机科学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q1\",\"JCRName\":\"COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Systems and Software","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224001535","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING","Score":null,"Total":0}
Conversation in forums: How software forum posts discuss potential development insights
User feedback on software usage is utilised by developers to improve their software. Software product forums are platforms rich in software-related user feedback, such as forum threads containing bug reports or requests for new features. However, previous studies have mainly focused on analysing user feedback from software product forums as individual sentences, which can lead to missing insights and a lack of understanding of the overall context of forum posts. To fill this gap in research, this work examines user feedback found in software product forum posts to investigate the differences between content classifications found in forum sentences and posts. We manually evaluated software product forum posts collected from two open-sourced software product forums and discovered five new types of user feedback that can only be identified when examining user feedback in the form of forum posts. Additionally, we examined the association between sentence classifications found within software product forums. Our results indicate that contextual information complimenting product improvement insights can be found in software product forums, with a confidence of 0.75 and 0.69 for the association between apparent bug and application usage sentences. This information can be used to reduce manual efforts required to chase up missing contextual information when attempting to understand or fix software issues. We also provide insights into the progression of posts in software product forums at the thread-level, and our progression flowchart can be used to summarise the sequence of events in software product forum threads. Our findings reveal the importance of looking at user feedback within software product forums in the format of forum posts to identify new insights on user feedback for software improvements.
Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Systems and Software publishes papers covering all aspects of software engineering and related hardware-software-systems issues. All articles should include a validation of the idea presented, e.g. through case studies, experiments, or systematic comparisons with other approaches already in practice. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Methods and tools for, and empirical studies on, software requirements, design, architecture, verification and validation, maintenance and evolution
• Agile, model-driven, service-oriented, open source and global software development
• Approaches for mobile, multiprocessing, real-time, distributed, cloud-based, dependable and virtualized systems
• Human factors and management concerns of software development
• Data management and big data issues of software systems
• Metrics and evaluation, data mining of software development resources
• Business and economic aspects of software development processes
The journal welcomes state-of-the-art surveys and reports of practical experience for all of these topics.