Mining Questions Asked about Continuous Software Engineering
Mansooreh Zahedi, Roshan Namal Rajapakse, Muhammad Ali Babar
Abstract
Context: With the growing popularity of rapid software delivery and deployment, the methods, practices and technologies of Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) are evolving steadily. This creates the need for understanding the recent trends of the technologies, practitioners' challenges and views in this domain. Objective: In this paper, we present an empirical study aimed at exploring CSE from the practitioners' perspective by mining discussions from Q&A websites. Method: We have analyzed 12,989 questions and answers posted on Stack Overflow. Topic modelling is conducted to derive the dominant topics in this domain. Further, a qualitative analysis was conducted to identify the key challenges discussed. Findings: Whilst the trend of posted questions is sharply increasing, the questions are becoming more specific to technologies and more difficult to attract answers. We identified 32 topics of discussions, among which "Error messages in Continuous Integration/Deployment" and "Continuous Integration concepts" are the most dominant. We also present the most challenging areas in this domain from the practitioners' perspectives.