Replication Package

<b>Replication Package of the Empirical Study</b><br>To replicate the experiments described in the paper, we provide the following resources:- <b>`study_methodology`</b>: This folder contains sections detailing our application of BERTopic topic modeling and the dataset used. It includes two subfolders:<b>`data`</b>: Contains posts related to microservices deployment used in this study, as well as questions and their links addressed in RQ2 of the paper.<b>`Topic Modeling`</b>: Implements the BERTopic topic modeling process. The trained model is saved in the `saved_model` folder.- <b>`RQ1`</b> folder: Contains the script for measuring the number of questions per topic and extracting the related posts for each topic (RQ1 results).- <b>`RQ2`</b> folder: Contains the script for computing the difficulty and popularity metrics (RQ2 results).- <b>`RQ3`</b> folder: Contains the script for analyzing the evolution of microservices deployment questions and the users involved in related discussions from 2013 to 2023, as well as the evolution of questions per topic over the years (RQ3 results).