Anja Guzzi

Communication in open source software development mailing lists

Open source software (OSS) development teams use electronic means, such as emails, instant messaging, or forums, to conduct open and public discussions. Researchers investigated mailing lists considering them as a hub for project communication. Prior work focused on specific aspects of emails, for example the handling of patches, traceability concerns, or social networks. This led to insights pertaining to the investigated aspects, but not to a comprehensive view of what developers communicate about. Our objective is to increase the understanding of development mailing lists communication. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed a sample of 506 email threads from the development mailing list of a major OSS project, Lucene. Our investigation reveals that implementation details are discussed only in about 35% of the threads, and that a range of other topics is discussed. Moreover, core developers participate in less than 75% of the threads. We observed that the development mailing list is not the main player in OSS project communication, as it also includes other channels such as the issue repository.

Adinda: a knowledgeable, browser-based IDE

In practice, many people have to work together to develop and maintain a software system. However, the programmers key tool, the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), is a solo-tool, serving to help individual programmers understand and modify the system. Such an IDE does not leverage the knowledge other team members may have of the design and implementation of the system. We propose to resolve this problem by exploring, experimentally, new ways of inferring knowledge from past IDE-interactions, and of maximizing collaboration among developers. Our approach, called Adinda, revolves around transforming the IDE into a set of integrated services, accessible via a web browser, and enriched with Web 2.0 technologies. Such services will not only help developers perform traditional IDE tasks, but also facilitate the required informal communication and collaboration needs of software development projects. In this paper, we report on our vision, approach and challenges for building Adinda, and initial results.

Supporting Collaboration Awareness with Real-Time Visualization of Development Activity

In the context of multi-developer projects, where several people are contributing code, developers must deal with concurrent development. Collaboration among developers assumes a fundamental role, and failing to address it can result, for example, in shipping delays. We argue that tool support for collaborative software development augments the level of awareness of developers, and consequently, help them to collaborate and coordinate their activities. In this context, we present an approach to augment awareness by recovering development information in real time and broadcasting it to developers in the form of three lightweight visualizations. Scamp, the Eclipse plug-in supporting this, is part of our Syde tool to support collaboration. We illustrate the usage of Scamp in the context of two multi-developer projects.

Combining micro-blogging and IDE interactions to support developers in their quests

Software engineers spend a considerable amount of time on program comprehension. Although vendors of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and analysis tools address this challenge, current support for reusing and sharing program comprehension knowledge is limited. As a consequence, developers have to go through the time-consuming program understanding phase multiple times, instead of recalling knowledge from their past or others program comprehension activities. In this paper, we present an approach to making the knowledge gained during the program comprehension process accessible, by combining micro-blog messages with interaction data automatically collected from the IDE. We implemented the approach in an Eclipse plugin called James and performed a first evaluation of the underlying approach effectiveness, assessing the nature and usefulness of the collected messages, as well as the added benefit of combining them with interaction data.

Facilitating enterprise software developer communication with CARES

Enterprise software developers must regularly communicate with one another to obtain information and coordinate changes to legacy code, but find it cumbersome and complicated to determine the most relevant and expedient person to contact. This becomes especially difficult when the relevant person has transferred teams or changed their personal contact information since contributing to the project. We conducted a year-long series of surveys and interviews to help us learn how, why, and how often software developers discover and communicate with one another. In response to what we saw, we designed, deployed, and evaluated a domain-specific, IDE-embedded, photo-oriented, communication tool. We overcame a significant challenge found in long-lived projects: uniquely identifying individuals years after their contributions to the project. After deploying our tool, iteratively refining it, and deploying it again on a company-wide scale, most users reported that it simplified the process of finding and reaching out to other developers and offered them a sense of community with their colleagues, even if those colleagues did not currently work on their team. The lessons learned from our study and tool development should apply to other large, multi-team, legacy software projects.

Documenting and sharing knowledge about code

Software engineers spend a considerable amount of time on program comprehension. Current research has primarily focused on assisting the developer trying to build up his understanding of the code. This knowledge remains only in the mind of the developer and, as time elapses, often “disappears”. In this research, we shift the focus to the developer who is using her Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for writing, modifying, or reading the code, and who actually understands the code she is working with. The objective of this PhD research is to seek ways to support this developer to document and share her knowledge with the rest of the team. In particular, we investigate the full potential of micro-blogging integrated into the IDE for addressing the program comprehension problem.