Characterizing Participants of Community Question-Answering Sites: A Study of Stack Exchange Project Management

ABSTRACT Background. Gray literature (GL) can provide valuable insights into software engineering (SE) practitioners’ opinions, behavior, and practices. Since SE professionals widely use community questionanswering sites (CQAs), these platforms have increasingly been adopted in SE research. However, despite the popularity of GL in SE studies, the research community still lacks a clear understanding of how to characterize the subset of CQA participants whose publicly traceable profiles allow researchers to relate forum activity to professional background. Objective. This paper aims to characterize a visible and engaged subset of CQA participants, in order to better understand the professional background behind the content used in GL-based SE research. Method. To achieve this goal, we mined and analyzed the profiles of participants in the Stack Exchange Project Management (SEPM) CQA. We selected SEPM participants who met the minimum forum privilege requirements (i.e., voting privileges) and public links to their LinkedIn pages. After excluding broken links and invalid profiles through qualitative inspection, we analyzed 929 profiles quantitatively and qualitatively, focusing on participants’ professional trajectories, educational background, skills, and participation in the forum. Results. Our results provide an empirical characterization of LinkedIn-exposed SEPM participants by identifying: (i) their professional roles and experience levels, and (ii) how their forum activity relates to their professional background. Conclusion. Characterizing visible and engaged CQA participants with publicly traceable professional profiles is essential for a more informed use of GL in SE research. This paper contributes by showing how participant characterization can support a more robust interpretation of forum content and provide a stronger basis for assessing the reliability of informal evidence sources, while making explicit the scope of the subset that can be examined through this approach.