How Do Users Answer MATLAB Questions on Q&A Sites? A Case Study on Stack Overflow and MathWorks

Abstract

MATLAB is an engineering programming language with various toolboxes that has a dedicated Question and Answer (Q&A) platform on the MathWorks website, which is similar to Stack Overflow (SO). Moreover, some MATLAB users ask their questions on SO. This paper aims to compare these two Q&A platforms to see what kind of questions are asked and how developers answer these questions in each platform. The result of our analysis on 80,382 MATLAB questions on SO and 266,367 questions on MathWorks show that MATLAB questions on topics ranging from the MATLAB software installation to questions related to programming received high votes and accepted answers on MathWorks. However, the questions about basics of programming such as plots, functions, and variables and questions on converting MATLAB code to other programming languages are very likely to receive answers on SO. Our detailed analysis on SO shows that users answer MATLAB questions with the same rate of the accepted answer as other popular programming languages like Java and Python, but the rate of unanswered questions and questions without an accepted answer for Simulink and the three most popular MATLAB toolboxes -- image processing, signal processing, and computer vision -- are very high. To analyze the evolution of MATLAB questions on SO, we studied 80,382 MATLAB questions using the SOTorrent dataset. The patterns in MATLAB questions' evolution are: 1) Most of the revisions to questions are text-related and not on code snippets. 2) Most of the code-related revisions were performed by the original poster (OP). 3) Non-original posters (Non-OPs) usually revise code snippets' appearance, while OPs usually revise code snippets' content and logic.