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To talk or not to talk: factors that influence communication around changesets

Published: 11 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Building tools to help software developers communicate effectively requires a deep understanding of their communication dynamics. To date we do not have good comprehension of why developers talk to each other as a result of some events in the life of their projects, and not of others. This lack of knowledge makes it difficult to design useful communication models and support systems.
In this paper, we narrow down the study of communication behaviour to focus on interactions that occur as a result of a particular kind of project event: the submission of a changeset to the project repository. In a case study with the IBM® Rational® Team Concert™ development team we investigate which factors influence developers to request information about a changeset to their product. We identify several such factors, including the development mode in which the team is operating, the background and recent performance of the author of the changeset, and the risk that the changeset poses to the stability of the product. Incorporating these factors into recommender systems may lead to improvements in their performance.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 2012
1460 pages
ISBN:9781450310864
DOI:10.1145/2145204
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 11 February 2012

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Author Tags

  1. communication
  2. information sharing
  3. software teams

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CSCW '12
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CSCW '12: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 11 - 15, 2012
Washington, Seattle, USA

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CSCW '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 415 submissions, 40%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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  • (2021)Data Mining based Inferences about Software ParametersYazılım Parametreleri ile ilgili Veri Madenciliğine Dayalı ÇıkarımlarALKÜ Fen Bilimleri Dergisi10.46740/alku.9858393:3(9-24)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2021
  • (2021)Software Risk Assessment and Management with Rules Based on Fuzzy ApproachDeu Muhendislik Fakultesi Fen ve Muhendislik10.21205/deufmd.202123691823:69(903-911)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2021
  • (2021)Links do Matter: Understanding the Drivers of Developer Interactions in Software Ecosystems2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME52107.2021.00068(619-623)Online publication date: Sep-2021
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