Toward understanding the causes of unanswered questions in software information sites: a case study of stack overflow

Stack Overflow is a highly successful question-answering website in the programming community, which not only provide quick solutions to programmers’ questions but also is considered as a large repository of valuable software engineering knowledge. However, despite having a very engaged and active user community, Stack Overflow currently has more than 300K unanswered questions. In this paper, we perform an initial investigation to understand why these questions remain unanswered by applying a combination of statistical and data mining techniques. Our preliminary results indicate that although there are some topics that were never answered, most questions remained unanswered because they apparently are of little interest to the user community.