Software developers use many tools to support their work. They coordinate with their teams on code hosting sites, interface with non-developers in project management apps, use microblogs to network, and learn through Q&A sites and podcasts.
They do derive value from those tools — but what problems and challenges do they have to cope with in return?
Software developers use more and more tools in their work. Some are directly aimed at creating software, such as IDEs or editors, but many tools play more supportive roles. They help developers communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with others, find new work, or keep up with new technologies.
All these tools and channels are built by people who are software developers themselves.
Lots of research in software engineering is using publicly-available data from GitHub nowadays. But do findings from such studies translate to closed-sourced development projects?
Back when I was at the University of Hannover working on my PhD, I was also involved in teaching. One of the most memorable experiences was organizing and managing the “software project” course four years in a row.
Every year, multiple teams of five students each went through a waterfall process to create software for a customer. This course wasn’t about programming, really: it was about working on a team, communication, and good practices. That’s what made it so memorable.
Many software developers use Twitter in their work, but how and why exactly do they use it? Why do some developers choose not to use Twitter, and what — if anything — do they use instead? We conducted a qualitative study to investigate these questions in depth.
Previous research suggests that the publicity on GitHub that is making developers’ actions and interactions more visible might have an effect on how software development practices are communicated and how they diffuse in projects.
My colleagues (Raphael Pham, Olga Liskin, Fernando Figueira Filho, Kurt Schneider) and I wondered: which influence does this have on testing practices? Does this create new challenges, and if so, how do developers cope with them? Which strategies do members of GitHub use to create a beneficial testing culture in their projects? To investigate this, we conducted interviews and questionnaires with diverse users of GitHub.
Developers use social media sites to communicate, collaborate, connect with each other, and even for competition. These sites and their users create a social programmer ecosystem with dynamics that are the subject of ongoing research.
Recently, websites have appeared that create profiles from developers’ content and activities on other sites — they are developer profile aggregators. Examples are Masterbranch and Coderwall. Among other mechanisms, both services award achievement badges to developers for specific accomplishments — such as being the most active committer in a project, or having a project forked by others.
With colleagues from Brazil and Canada, we studied users of these sites, providing us with a window into the social programmer ecosystem.