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An empirical study of IoT topics in IoT developer discussions on Stack Overflow

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Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as the connection between places and physical objects (i.e., things) over the Internet via smart computing devices. It is a rapidly emerging paradigm that encompasses almost every aspect of our modern life, such as smart home, cars, and so on. With interest in IoT growing, we observe that the IoT discussions are becoming prevalent in online developer forums, such as Stack Overflow (SO). An understanding of such discussions can offer insights into the prevalence, popularity, and difficulty of various IoT topics. For this paper, we download a large number of SO posts that contain discussions about various IoT technologies. We apply topic modeling on the textual contents of the posts. We label the topics and categorize the topics into hierarchies. We analyze the popularity and difficulty of the topics. Our study offers several findings. First, IoT developers discuss a range of topics in SO related to Hardware, Software, Network, and Tutorials. Second, secure messaging using IoT devices from the Network category is the most prevalent topic, followed by scheduling of IoT script in the Software category. Third, all the topic categories are evolving rapidly in SO, i.e., new questions are being added more and more in SO about IoT tools and techniques. Fourth, the “How” type of questions are asked more across the three topic categories (Software, Network, and Hardware), although a large number of questions are also of the “What” type: IoT developers are using SO not only to discuss how to address a problem related to IoT, but also to learn what the different IoT techniques and tools offer. Fifth, topics related to data parsing and micro-controller configuration are the most popular. Sixth, topics related to multimedia streaming and Bluetooth are the most difficult. Our study findings have implications for all four different IoT stakeholders: tool builders, developers, educators, and researchers. For example, IoT developers and newcomers can use our findings on topic popularity to learn about popular IoT techniques. Educators and researchers can make more tutorials or develop new techniques to make difficult IoT topics easier. IoT tool builders can look at our identified topics and categories to learn about IoT developers’ preferences, which then can help them develop new tools or enhance their current offerings.

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Notes

  1. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/235092

  2. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/186910

  3. https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/related-tags

  4. Qi and Ai denote a question or an answer in SO with ID i

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Acknowledgment

We sincerely thank the anonymous EMSE reviewers, who helped to significantly improve our paper in the revised manuscript with comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

    Gias Uddin

  2. Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

    Fatima Sabir & Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

  3. COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Lahore, Pakistan

    Fatima Sabir

  4. Trent University, Peterborough, Canada

    Omar Alam

  5. Polytechnique Montréal, Montreal, Canada

    Foutse Khomh

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  1. Gias Uddin
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Correspondence to Gias Uddin.

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Communicated by: Shaowei Wang, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Sebastian Baltes, Ivano Malavolta, Christoph Treude and Alexander Serebrenik

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Uddin, G., Sabir, F., Guéhéneuc, YG. et al. An empirical study of IoT topics in IoT developer discussions on Stack Overflow. Empir Software Eng 26, 121 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10021-5

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