The Rise of the Social Developer Within a Participatory Culture of Software Engineering

“Software developers rely on many different media to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with others.
Recently, social tools have dramatically changed the landscape of software engineering, challenging the old-fashioned stereotype of the solitary and selfish developer.
In particular, we see the rise of the “”social developer”” with a participatory culture of software development forming, whereby developers want to engage with, learn from, and co-create software with others.

In this talk, I will present the past, present, and future roles of socially enabled tools in software engineering, reviewing research that examines the use of different media channels in software engineering from 1968 to the present day. I will also provide results from interviews and surveys we have conducted with thousands of developers that actively use social media to understand how they communicate and collaborate, and to gain insights into the challenges they face. We found that while this particular population values social media, traditional channels, such as face-to-face communication, are still considered crucial. I will further synthesize findings from our historical review and studies to propose future work for both practitioners and researchers to consider. “

Series:
Microsoft Research Talks
Date:
Speakers:
Margaret-Anne Storey
Affiliation:
University of Victoria and Microsoft TSE

Series: