Characterizing user behaviors in open-source software user forums: an empirical study

User forums of Open Source Software (OSS) enable end-users to collaboratively discuss problems concerning the OSS applications. Despite decades of research on OSS, we know very little about how end-users engage with OSS communities on these forums, in particular, the challenges that hinder their con...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hellman, Jazlyn, Chen, Jiahao, Uddin, Md. Sami, Cheng, Jinghui, Guo, Jin L. C.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral sciences
Conferences
General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Empirical studies
Human-centered computing > Collaborative and social computing > Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing
linguistic analysis
Linguistics
Message systems
Open source software
Oral communication
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Collaboration in software development > Open source model
Stakeholders
user forums
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Summary:User forums of Open Source Software (OSS) enable end-users to collaboratively discuss problems concerning the OSS applications. Despite decades of research on OSS, we know very little about how end-users engage with OSS communities on these forums, in particular, the challenges that hinder their continuous and meaningful participation in the OSS community. Many previous works are developer-centric and overlook the importance of end-user forums. As a result, end-users' expectations are seldom reflected in OSS development. To better understand user behaviors in OSS user forums, we carried out an empirical study analyzing about 1.3 million posts from user forums of four popular OSS applications: Zotero, Audacity, VLC, and RStudio. Through analyzing the contribution patterns of three common user types (end-users, developers, and organizers), we observed that end-users not only initiated most of the threads (above 96% of threads in three projects, 86% in the other), but also acted as the significant contributors for responding to other users' posts, even though they tended to lack confidence in their activities as indicated by psycho-linguistic analyses. Moreover, we found end-users more open, reflecting a more positive emotion in communication than organizers and developers in the forums. Our work contributes new knowledge about end-users' activities and behaviors in OSS user forums that the vital OSS stakeholders can leverage to improve end-user engagement in the OSS development process.
ISSN:2574-1837
DOI:10.1145/3528579.3529178