Of Teams and Automation: Lessons in Social Coding from Github

  • Bogdan Vasilescu | University of California - Davis

“Social coding” is a phrase made popular by GitHub, the online collaborative coding platform home to millions of users and repositories. It has come to represent a paradigm shift in software development, especially in the open source world. Coding has always been human-centric, but never more so than with the advent of GitHub. Code is rarely written for oneself, is meant to be shared, and changed by others as needed.

This talk reports on some of our adventures in learning about the social side of software engineering from the transparent universe of GitHub. Through a series of mixed-methods empirical studies of GitHub, I will offer insights into two separate topics: (1) coders’ perception of individual differences between them and their teammates, e.g., gender and programming expertise, and the effects of gender diversity on team performance, and (2) how project managers resort to both technology and social cues when dealing with the uncertainty associated with evaluating outside contributions.

Speaker Details

Bogdan Vasilescu is a Computer Science postdoc in the DECAL lab at UC Davis. His research focuses on process automation and social aspects (e.g., team diversity) in distributed software development, often crossing the border between software engineering and HCI. Bogdan obtained his PhD and MSc both cum laude at Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) in October 2014 and July 2011, respectively; he also holds a cum laude Computer Science degree from Romania since July 2009. This year, Bogdan’s PhD thesis received the “best dissertation of 2014” award from the Institute for Programming Research and Algorithmics in The Netherlands.

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      Jeff Running

Series: Microsoft Research Talks