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A comparative study of FAQs for software development

Published: 26 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Developers use FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) to access and share knowledge about software libraries, APIs, and platforms. This paper studies 2,660 questions from 43 FAQ websites. We analyzed accessibility metrics such as the steps from the main documentation page, tagging or multilingualism as well as structure and readability metrics such as code-to-text ratio, number of links, and Flesch Reading-Ease. In addition, we compared these FAQs to 69,548 Stack Overflow (SO) posts, which cover the same topics and which have been posted by developers at least twice (i.e. duplicates). Our results reveal that different software vendors give different importance to their FAQs, e.g. by investing more effort or less in structuring and presenting them. We found that studied FAQs include more references (e.g. to corresponding API documentation) and are more verbose and difficult to read than corresponding SO duplicates. We also found that FAQs cover additional topics compared to corresponding duplicate posts.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)How Do HCI Researchers Describe Their Software Tools? Insights From a Synopsis Survey of Tools for Multimodal InteractionCompanion Publication of the 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3461615.3485431(7-12)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021

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cover image ACM Conferences
SQUADE 2019: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Software Qualities and Their Dependencies
August 2019
38 pages
ISBN:9781450368575
DOI:10.1145/3340495
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 26 August 2019

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Author Tags

  1. Duplicates
  2. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
  3. Knowledge Sharing
  4. Software Development
  5. Software Quality
  6. Stack Overflow

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  • (2021)How Do HCI Researchers Describe Their Software Tools? Insights From a Synopsis Survey of Tools for Multimodal InteractionCompanion Publication of the 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3461615.3485431(7-12)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021

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