Alexey Zagalsky

The (R) Evolution of social media in software engineering

Software developers rely on media to communicate, learn, collaborate, and coordinate with others. Recently, social media has dramatically changed the landscape of software engineering, challenging some old assumptions about how developers learn and work with one another. We see the rise of the social programmer who actively participates in online communities and openly contributes to the creation of a large body of crowdsourced socio-technical content. In this paper, we examine the past, present, and future roles of social media in software engineering. We provide a review of research that examines the use of different media channels in software engineering from 1968 to the present day. We also provide preliminary results from a large survey with developers that actively use social media to understand how they communicate and collaborate, and to gain insights into the challenges they face. We find that while this particular population values social media, traditional channels, such as face-to-face communication, are still considered crucial. We synthesize findings from our historical review and survey to propose a roadmap for future research on this topic. Finally, we discuss implications for research methods as we argue that social media is poised to bring about a paradigm shift in software engineering research.

How Social and Communication Channels Shape and Challenge a Participatory Culture in Software Development

Software developers use many different communication tools and channels in their work. The diversity of these tools has dramatically increased over the past decade and developers now have access to a wide range of socially enabled communication channels and social media to support their activities. The availability of such social tools is leading to a participatory culture of software development, where developers want to engage with, learn from, and co-create software with other developers. However, the interplay of these social channels, as well as the opportunities and challenges they may create when used together within this participatory development culture are not yet well understood. In this paper, we report on a large-scale survey conducted with 1,449 GitHub users. We discuss the channels these developers find essential to their work and gain an understanding of the challenges they face using them. Our findings lay the empirical foundation for providing recommendations to developers and tool designers on how to use and improve tools for software developers.

Disrupting developer productivity one bot at a time

Bots are used to support different software development activities, from automating repetitive tasks to bridging knowledge and communication gaps in software teams. We anticipate the use of Bots will increase and lead to improvements in software quality and developer and team productivity, but what if the disruptive effect is not what we expect? Our goal in this paper is to provoke and inspire researchers to study the impact (positive and negative) of Bots on software development. We outline the modern Bot landscape and use examples to describe the common roles Bots occupy in software teams. We propose a preliminary cognitive support framework that can be used to understand these roles and to reflect on the impact of Bots in software development on productivity. Finally, we consider challenges that Bots may bring and propose some directions for future research.

The Emergence of GitHub as a Collaborative Platform for Education

The software development community has embraced GitHub as an essential platform for managing their software projects. GitHub has created efficiencies and helped improve the way software professionals work. It not only provides a traceable project repository, but it acts as a social meeting place for interested parties, supporting communities of practice. Recently, educators have seen the potential in GitHubs collaborative features for managing and improving---perhaps even transforming---the learning experience. In this study, we examine how GitHub is emerging as a collaborative platform for education. We aim to understand how environments such as GitHub---environments that provide social and collaborative features in conjunction with distributed version control---may improve (or possibly hinder) the educational experience for students and teachers. We conduct a qualitative study focusing on how GitHub is being used in education, and the motivations, benefits and challenges it brings.

How the R community creates and curates knowledge: a comparative study of stack overflow and mailing lists

One of the many effects of social media in software development is the flourishing of very large communities of practice where members share a common interest, such as programming languages, frameworks, and tools. These communities of practice use many different communication channels but little is known about how these communities create, share, and curate knowledge using such channels. In this paper, we report a qualitative study of how one community of practice—the R software development community—creates and curates knowledge associated with questions and answers (Q&A) in two of its main communication channels: the R-tag in Stack Overflow and the R-users mailing list. The results reveal that knowledge is created and curated in two main forms: participatory, where multiple members explicitly collaborate to build knowledge, and crowdsourced, where individuals work independently of each other. The contribution of this paper is a characterization of knowledge types that are exchanged by these communities of practice, including a description of the reasons why members choose one channel over the other. Finally, this paper enumerates a set of recommendations to assist practitioners in the use of multiple channels for Q&A.

Student experiences using GitHub in software engineering courses: a case study

GitHub has been embraced by the software development community as an important social platform for managing software projects and to support collaborative development. More recently, educators have begun to adopt it for hosting course content and student assignments. From our previous research, we found that educators leverage GitHub’s collaboration and transparency features to create, reuse and remix course materials, and to encourage student contributions and monitor student activity on assignments and projects. However, our previous research did not consider the student perspective. In this paper, we present a case study where GitHub is used as a learning platform for two software engineering courses. We gathered student perspectives on how the use of GitHub in their courses might benefit them and to identify the challenges they may face. The findings from our case study indicate that software engineering students do benefit from GitHub’s transparent and open workflow. However, students were concerned that since GitHub is not inherently an educational tool, it lacks key features important for education and poses learning and privacy concerns. Our findings provide recommendations for designers on how tools such as GitHub can be used to improve software engineering education, and also point to recommendations for instructors on how to use it more effectively in their courses.

How the R community creates and curates knowledge: an extended study of stack overflow and mailing lists

One of the effects of social media’s prevalence in software development is the many flourishing communities of practice where users share a common interest. These large communities use many different communication channels, but little is known about how they create, share, and curate knowledge using such channels. In this paper, we report a mixed methods study of how one community of practice, the R software development community, creates and curates knowledge associated with questions and answers (Q&A) in two of its main communication channels: the R tag in Stack Overflow and the R-Help mailing list. The results reveal that knowledge is created and curated in two main forms: participatory, where multiple users explicitly collaborate to build knowledge, and crowdsourced, where individuals primarily work independently of each other. Moreover, we take a unique approach at slicing the data based on question score and participation activities over time. Our study reveals participation patterns, showing the existence of prolific contributors: users who are active across both channels and are responsible for a large proportion of the answers, serving as a bridge of knowledge. The key contributions of this paper are: a characterization of knowledge artifacts that are exchanged by this community of practice; the reasons why users choose one channel over the other; and insights on the community participation patterns, which indicate an evolution of the community and a shift from knowledge creation to knowledge curation.

Regulation as an enabler for collaborative software development

Collaboration has become an integral aspect of software engineering. The widespread availability and adoption of social channels has led to a culture where todays developers participate and collaborate more frequently with one another. Awareness is widely accepted as an important feature of collaboration, but exactly what this encompasses and how processes and tools should be evaluated in terms of their awareness support remains an open challenge. In this paper, we borrow a theory of regulation from the Learning Science domain and show how this theory can be used to provide more detailed insights into how collaboration tools and processes can be compared and analyzed.

People Analytics in Software Development

Developers are using more and more different channels and tools to collaborate, and integrations between these tools are becoming more prevalent. In turn, more data about developers’ interactions at work will become available. These developments will likely make People Analytics — using data to show and improve how people collaborate — more accessible and in turn more important for software developers. Even though developer collaboration has been the focus of several research groups and studies, we believe these changes will qualitatively change how some developers work. We provide an introduction to existing work in this field and outline where it could be headed.