What Do Practitioners Discuss about IoT and Industry 4.0 Related Technologies? Characterization and Identification of IoT and Industry 4.0 Categories in Stack Overflow Discussions

Internet of Things and Industry 4.0-related discussions have become increasingly prevalent on several online Q&A websites in recent years. Analyzing and understanding such discussions could provide practitioners with more insights into various trends in the evolution of topics of interest and help different research communities, including software development and industrial sectors, better understand the needs and challenges facing practitioners as they operate in these fields. We conduct an exploratory study to capture and compare the popularity as well as the effect of the discussion topics on the domain across such communities. We use extracted data from popular online Q&A websites, such as Stack Exchange, and investigate 176,819 posts to investigate what practitioners are asking and looking for. We also use Machine Learning for Language Toolkit (MALLET) based-Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic models to help summarize Internet of Things/Industry 4.0-related questions, identify the most challenging popular related issues, explore specific issues of the Internet of Things/Industry 4.0, and investigate the types of questions that practitioners ask about. We summarize all the topics into various categories and evaluate the popularity and difficulty of various topics as well. Our findings help to highlight the challenges facing the Internet of Things/Industry 4.0 practitioners which in the future would require more attention from various research and software development communities and develop new approaches to analyzing questions posed on various Q&A forums. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.