ETA: Estimated Time of Answer Predicting Response Time in Stack Overflow

Question and Answer (Q&A) sites help developers dealing with the increasing complexity of software systems and third-party components by providing a platform for exchanging knowledge about programming topics. A shortcoming of Q&A sites is that they provide no indication on when an answer is to be expected. Such an indication would help, for example, the developers who posed the questions in managing their time. We try to fill this gap by investigating whether and how answering time for a question posed on Stack Overflow, a prominent example of Q&A websites, can be predicted considering its tags. To this aim, we first determine the types of answers to be considered valid answers to the question, after which the answering time was predicted based on similarity of the set of tags. Our results show that the classification is correct in 30%-35% of the cases.