Conversation in forums: How software forum posts discuss potential software requirements

User feedback on software usage is utilised to formulate software requirements, and software product forums are platforms rich in software-related user feedback. However, previous studies have mainly focused on analysing forum user feedback as individual sentences, which can lead to missing insights and a lacking understanding of the overall context of forum posts. This work examines software forum user feedback in forum posts to investigate the differences between sentence and post-level content analysis. We manually evaluated software forum posts collected from two open-sourced software forums and discovered five new types of user feedback that can only be identified in post-level analysis. Additionally, we examined the association between sentence classifications found within software forums. Our results indicate that contextual information related to requirements frequently appears with explicit requirement statements in forum posts. This information can be used to reduce the manual effort required to chase up missing contextual information when working through an issue. We also provide insights into the order of events happening in software product forums at the post level. Our findings reveal the importance of looking at forum-based user feedback at a post level to identify new insights on user feedback for requirements engineering.

The file contains the post-level classification dataset created from this study as well as our heatmap figures for RQ2.