Association rule mining for finding usability problem patterns: A case study on StackOverflow

Usually, developers suffer from usability related problems during working with software development tools. Such problems should be detected to improve developer team performance. To tackle this problem, pattern discovery techniques can be used to locate usability problems by analyzing the feedback of users extracted from software repositories. In this paper, a comprehensive data analysis methodology is presented to extract hidden knowledge for acquiring user challenges regarding tools interaction. The main motivation of this paper is to involve the role of knowledge in software development process such as Agile development. Rich user feedback datasets from StackOverflow programming Question and Answer (Q&A) repository have been used as the input of Apriori algorithm while required preprocessing has been considered. The generated results are association rules representing the usability problem patterns among tools and technologies interactions. The results can also be used for effort planning when a software upgrade needs to be considered.