Large scale empirical study on front-end software development technology from community QA sites

Abstract

Front-endsoftwaredevelopmenttechnologyhasbeenrapidlyevolvingforthepastdecadeand dominating over other technologies.The major part of this technology is possessed by the JavaScript(JS)frameworkswhichareintroducingnewertechnologiesdaybydaytomakethe front face of software more appealing to the users.To keep up the pace, front-end develop- ers face many challenges which lead to discussions in community Q&A sites such as Stack Overflow (SO).In this study, we analyze SO posts to give an insight into the challenges and difficultiesthefront-endcommunityfacesaswellastheirinterests.Thisstudygivesabetterun- derstandingofthemostdiscussedandtrendingtopicsinSO.Toconductthestudy,weconsider thetop3popularJSframeworksanddevelopatagsettoextractthepostsfromtheSOdump. Thenwerunatopicmodelingalgorithmonthepoststogeneratethetopicset,labelthetopics, categorizethem,andcreateahierarchyofthecategories. Afterthat,weanalyzethepopularity anddifficultyofthetopicsbasedonthedata.Moreover, weinvestigatetheevolutionaltrends ofthetopicsovertime. Wechooseourapproachcarefullytomitigateallthepossiblerisksand threats that come along the way.This study can help future practitioners and researchers to come up with new techniques to overcome the challenges and difficulties at an early stage of front-end development.