SharePoint development state in 2019: story based on sharepoint.stackexchange analysis with Power BI

The year 2019 is over and once again it’s time to perform regular analysis of data at sharepoint.stackexchange. This is the fourth edition of such analysis.

Tools used to collect and analyze data:

Power BI with Power BI Desktop - super cool tools for data analysis. If you don’t have experience with Power BI, it’s worth trying to see what is possible. When I first tried it a few years ago I was sooo impressed with power yet simplicity in performing data analysis and building visualizations. It works very well for both simple and advanced scenarios. I believe that everybody will find these tools useful for any kind of data analysis.
DaxStudio - extremely useful tool to test your DAX queries.
Power BI Community - Power BI has a very strong community. I found a lot of answers at their forum, I even asked some questions and community helped with valid answers. That’s not a “tool” but worth mentioning. I am grateful for all the answers.
Stack Exchange API

The source code used to gather initial data is available at GitHub.

The report

Click to open in a separate tab

Previous reports:

2018 Edition - Power BI report and blog post
2017 Edition - Power BI report and blog post
2016 Edition - Power BI report and blog post

Disclaimer

All thoughts are mine. Maybe they are not correct or you might think differently. Please share your thoughts and opinion in comments.

Ok, let’s get started! :)

Questions

Let’s take a look at questions.

The number of questions is slightly increased in 2019. However, I noticed that a lot of questions in 2018 were deleted. If you check out the previous report, the number of questions asked in 2018 was 9.5K. In 2019 is 7.8K, so it’s less than in 2018. However, data collected at the beginning of 2020 shows that in 2018 users aked 7K questions (not 9.5K like in the last year report). It means that during the year 2019 1.5K questions were deleted from 2018.

Since the real questions increase is only about 4%, then we see that users asked approximately the same amount of question in 2019 and 2018:

In general, users are less actively ask questions starting from 2017.

Now let’s take a look at how many questions received n answer, how many answers were accepted and how many questions haven’t received any answer.

Approximately 60% of questions don’t have an accepted answer

The situation will be slightly improved because some questions will receive an accepted answer in 2020.

When it comes to questions state trend, the situation in 2019 is almost the same as for 2018, meaning that the number of unanswered questions increases:

As a result, answers count per questions also goes down:

The same also applies for score per question trend - on average a question received less points in 2019:

InfoPath

WHAT??? Yes, InfoPath is alive! At least based on the number of questions with InfoPath tag in 2019:

Modern trends in questions

As usual, we see a strong increase in a number of questions on modern things. By modern I mean PnP, SharePoint Framework aka SPFx, pnpjs and everything about:

Answers

In 2019 users were answering questions 15% less often when compared to the previous year

You see on the above image, that the number of answers given slowly decreasing starting from 2016.

Now a few more fancy charts.

Below two charts show how many answers were given (trend) and how many answers were upvoted \ not upvoted. As we already have seen that users’ activity in 2019 goes down, below charts prove it.

In 2019, you have approximately 40% chance that you answer will be upvoted

When doing the report for 2018 I predicted that the situation in 2019 will be a little bit worse and I was right.

Users

The number of registered users decreased in 2019 (the same as in 2018). Still, there are a lot of inactive users (no answers and no questions). I don’t know the nature of these users.

Below trend clearly demonstrates that the popularity of SharePoint StackExchange slowly decreases over time:

Let’s explore users’ activity when it comes to answering questions.

How many answers a user gives? Below chart demonstrates that:

10 users have more than 1k of answers!

57% of all users haven’t provided any answers

TOPS (all time)

As usual, some statistics on TOPs.

On the next image we can see a new interesting beast:

I haven’t seen Community in the last year, but this time Community user gave 4k upvotes!

And, of course, TOP 10 by reputation:

Microsoft

In the previous release of the analysis (2018) I mentioned increased activity from Microsoft employees. In 2019 the situation was improved and even more Microsoft employees gave answers on questions.

In 2019 Microsoft employees gave 1.4k answers. It’s more than in 2018.

And it’s a lot and a great help!

When compared with the total number of answers in 2019, it gives us

which is a significant amount.

If we select our TOP 10 users in 2019 by number of answers, sum all their answers, it will give us

TOP 10 users (by answers count) together with Microsoft provide 46% of all answers on sharepoint.stackexchange.com. In 2018 it was 35%

Conclusion

Over a few recent years, we see that activity on SharePoint StackExchange slowly goes down. It started in 2017. My ideas why it’s happening:

SharePoint today is a too broad term, usually connected to different related services. More often questions on SE are about things related to SharePoint, or just too specific, thus have a very small chanсe to be answered
Other Q&A forums
The rise of GitHub as Q&A through issues

In general, my conclusion

SharePoint StackExchange still alive thanks to a small group of active people who constantly answer questions and thanks to Microsoft support. Without that users and Microsoft, you have a very small chance to receive an answer on your question on SharePoint SE platform. Still, SharePoint SE is a great Q&A database with lots of development questions about SharePoint,