  Context: Software practitioners adopt approaches like DevOps, Scrum, and
Waterfall for high-quality software development. However, limited research has
been conducted on exploring software development approaches concerning
practitioners discussions on Q&A forums. Objective: We conducted an empirical
study to analyze developers discussions on Q&A forums to gain insights into
software development approaches in practice. Method: We analyzed 13,903
developers posts across Stack Overflow (SO), Software Engineering Stack
Exchange (SESE), and Project Management Stack Exchange (PMSE) forums. A mixed
method approach, consisting of the topic modeling technique (i.e., Latent
Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)) and qualitative analysis, is used to identify
frequently discussed topics of software development approaches, trends
(popular, difficult topics), and the challenges faced by practitioners in
adopting different software development approaches. Findings: We identified 15
frequently mentioned software development approaches topics on Q&A sites and
observed an increase in trends for the top-3 most difficult topics requiring
more attention. Finally, our study identified 49 challenges faced by
practitioners while deploying various software development approaches, and we
subsequently created a thematic map to represent these findings. Conclusions:
The study findings serve as a useful resource for practitioners to overcome
challenges, stay informed about current trends, and ultimately improve the
quality of software products they develop.
