Are You Talking about Software Product Lines? An Analysis of Developer Communities

Community-question-answering systems, such as Stack Overflow, provide a platform for various communities to ask questions, discuss topics, and find knowledge. Especially software developers are heavily relying on such systems to identify solutions for their problems. While the content of community-question-answering systems may be less scientific, it usually represents practical knowledge from various perspectives and backgrounds. Thus, analyzing this content can be valuable for the scientific community to understand previous and current (i.e., open questions) needs of practitioners. In this paper, we report a systematic analysis of two websites that comprise communities with a focus on software development: Stack Exchange and Quora. We extract questions, answers, comments, and discussions on software product lines in general and feature modeling in particular. The results provide a historical perspective, an overview on commonly addressed scopes, and a classification of discussed topics and problems. Moreover, our findings are interesting to understand the practical impact of software-product-line techniques outside of well-analyzed case studies, to support lectures by identifying regularly asked questions, and to scope tool development based on reported technical problems.