Investigating Technology Usage Span by Analyzing Users' Q&A Traces in Stack Overflow

Choosing an appropriate software development technology (e.g., programming language) is challenging due to the proliferation of diverse options. The selection of inappropriate technologies for development may have a far-reaching effect on software developers' career growth. Switching to a different technology after working with one may lead to a complex learning curve and, thus, be more challenging. Therefore, it is crucial for software developers to find technologies that have a high usage span. Intuitively, the usage span of a technology can be determined by the time span developers have used that technology. Existing literature focuses on the technology landscape to explore the complex and implicit dependencies among technologies but lacks formal studies to draw insights about their usage span. This paper investigates the technology usage span by analyzing the question and answering (Q&A) traces of Stack Overflow (SO), the largest technical Q&A website available to date. In particular, we analyze 6.7 million Q&A traces posted by about 97K active SO users and see what technologies have appeared in their questions or answers over 15 years. According to our analysis, C# and Java programming languages have a high usage span, followed by JavaScript. Besides, developers used the .NET framework, iOS & Windows Operating Systems (OS), and SQL query language for a long time (on average). Our study also exposes the emerging (i.e., newly growing) technologies. For example, usages of technologies such as SwiftUI, .NET-6.0, Visual Studio 2022, and Blazor WebAssembly framework are increasing. The findings from our study can assist novice developers, startup software industries, and software users in determining appropriate technologies. This also establishes an initial benchmark for future investigation on the use span of software technologies.