The Use of Sub-forums in Software Product Forums

Abstract

Software product forums is a platform filled with user feedback that utilises the sub-forum feature to categorise user discussion into themes. These sub-forums are very similar to classification labels that have been used to automatically classify user feedback on other platforms such as Troubleshooting and Feature Request. It would be very beneficial to the CrowdRE community if these sub-forum categories can be utilised in a research setting as it would reduce the effort required to label content for classification manually. However, no research has been done on the accuracy of these sub-forum categorisations in software product forums. In this exploratory study, we examined the accuracy of user categorised posts in two software product forums and discovered that users incorrectly categorise more than 20% of the posts during submission. Our discovery suggests that at the current stage, sub-forum categories should not be trusted as a label to classify feedback automatically.