An empirical study of COVID-19 related posts on Stack Overflow: Topics and technologies.

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Information Technology
• Public Health

Background:

• The COVID-19 pandemic spurred significant IT initiatives for tracking and analysis.
• Developer communities like Stack Overflow became crucial for sharing information and solving problems related to COVID-19 software development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the developer community's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• To analyze COVID-19 related posts on Stack Overflow, identifying key technologies and persistent challenges.
• To assess the speed and effectiveness of the developer community's contribution to the pandemic response.

Main Methods:

• Descriptive statistics
• Association Rule Graphs
• Survival Analysis
• Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) applied to Stack Overflow posts.

Main Results:

• The developer community's response to COVID-19 was immediate and sustained.
• Prominent technologies for COVID-19 software development and their interrelations were identified.
• Key challenges revolved around data collection, analysis, and web-based visualization for pandemic monitoring.

Conclusions:

• The developer community actively and effectively contributed to addressing COVID-19 challenges through software development.
• Stack Overflow served as a vital knowledge-sharing hub for developers during the pandemic.
• Future efforts should consider the identified developer needs in data handling and visualization for public health crises.