A FAQ Finding Process in Open Source Project Forums

When people involve with software more in their daily lives, software companies must provide services through handling various operating questions that users request in the forums. However, different from conventional software companies, various types of difficulties, propositions and opinions could be issued by open source software users in addition to the operating questions. These difficulties, propositions and opinions are generally referred as questions in the forums. The questions, as valuable knowledge of the open source project, should be systematically managed. To manage the questions, a common strategy is to construct a FAQ in open source projects. The FAQ can reduce the volume of similar questions in the forums and prevent active forum members from wasting time on answering questions which are already handled before. Most previous literature focuses on existing FAQ retrieval instead of finding and constructing FAQ. This study, as a pioneering work, proposes a configurable and semi-automatic FAQ finding process to assist forum managers in constructing the FAQ. Also, two case studies are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed FAQ finding process.