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2013 5th International Workshop on Social Software Engineering (SSE), August 18, 2013, Saint Petersburg, Russia

SSE 2013 – Proceedings

Contents - Abstracts - Authors

2013 5th International Workshop on Social Software Engineering (SSE)

Title Page


Foreword
The Workshop on Social Software Engineering (SSE) focuses on the socialness of software engineering and of developed software. On one hand, we consider social factors in software engineering activities, processes and CASE tools to be useful to improve the quality of development processes and the software produced by them. Examples include the role of situational awareness and multi-cultural factors in collaborative software development. On the other hand, the dynamicity of the social contexts in which software could operate (e.g., in a cloud environment) calls for engineering social adaptability as a production-time iterative activity. One example is to gather users’ feedback on software quality and use it to autonomously or semi-autonomously adapt the software. The SSE workshop brings together academic and industrial perspectives to provide models, methods, tools and approaches to address these issues.

Uncovering Critical Coordination Requirements through Content Analysis
Kelly Blincoe, Giuseppe Valetto, and Daniela Damian
(Drexel University, USA; University of Victoria, Canada)
In this paper, we describe a way to identify the critical coordination needs that exist in a software development project through post-mortem content analysis and manual coding of task pairs. Our coding scheme provides guidelines on how to score the strength of the relationship of task pairs based on four characteristics. Such a method and coding scheme has the potential to become a research tool that can be used within the community of researchers and practitioners interested in the socio- technical aspects of software development to identify coordination needs for their analysis in future studies. We seek community feedback to help improve the proposed coding scheme.

Dynamic Networked Organizations for Software Engineering
Damian A. Tamburri, Remco de Boer, Elisabetta Di Nitto, Patricia Lago, and Hans van Vliet
(VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands; ArchiXL, Netherlands; Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Current practice in software engineering suggests a radical change in perspective: where once stood fixed teams of people following a development plan, now stand just-in-time Dynamic Networked Organizations (DyNOs), adopting a common flexible strategy for development, rather than a plan. This shift in perspective has gone relatively unnoticed by current software engineering research. This paper offers a glimpse at what processes and instruments lie beyond “current” software engineering research, where studying emergent DyNOs, their creation and steering becomes critical. To understand the underpinnings of this evolution, we explored a simple yet vivid scenario from real-life industrial practice. Using scenario analysis we elicited a number of social and organizational requirements in working with DyNOs. Also, comparing our evidence with literature, we made some key observations. First, managing DyNOs makes organizational requirements a first-class entity for development success. Second, research in software engineering should be invested in understanding and governing the DyNOs behind the software lifecycle.

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Can Social Awareness Foster Trust Building in Global Software Teams?
Fabio Calefato, Filippo Lanubile, and Francesco Sportelli
(University of Bari, Italy)
Trust is paramount in distributed software development to prevent geographically distributed sites to feel distant and act like distinct teams with own conflicting goals. Nevertheless, how to build trust among developers with few or no chances to meet is an open issue. To overcome such a challenge, we hypothesize that increased social awareness may foster trust building in global software teams. In this paper, we present two different empirical studies, specifically designed to test our hypotheses.

Why Is Collaboration Needed in OSS Projects? A Case Study of Eclipse Project
Hironori Hayashi, Akinori Ihara, Akito Monden, and Ken-ichi Matsumoto ORCID logo
(NAIST, Japan)
In open source software development, the collaboration among developers is the key to improve software quality. In particular, to fix a bug related to various parts of a system, developers need collaboration because each developer usually has very limited knowledge about a large software system. This paper aims to clarify how narrow (or how wide) is each developer's knowledge area in the Eclipse project, and how often do developers need to collaborate with each other. As a result of analysis, we found that 50 % of committers take care of just one or two modules, which indicates the necessity of collaboration when a bug-fix affects multiple modules. In addition, we also found the significant relationship between committers' collaborations and the re-opened bugs. We conclude that a committer should be aware the risk of re-opened bugs caused by the collaboration.

Geo-Locating the Knowledge Transfer in StackOverflow
Dennis Schenk and Mircea Lungu
(University of Bern, Switzerland)
Stack Overflow can be seen as an information market for software engineering knowledge in which the goods that are exchanged are answers to questions and the rewards are score points and badges that contribute to a users reputation. By analyzing the transactions in Stack Overflow we can get a glimpse of the way in which the different geographical regions in the world contribute to the knowledge market represented by the website. In this paper we aggregate the knowledge transfer from the level of the users to the level of geographical regions and learn that Europe and North America are the principal and virtually equal contributors; Asia comes as a distant third, mainly represented by India; and Oceania contributes less than Asia but more than South America and Africa together.

What Type of Thread Can Get Feedback in OSS User Mailing List?
Akinori Ihara, Yuji Tsuda, and Ken-ichi Matsumoto ORCID logo
(NAIST, Japan)
High quality Open Source Software (OSS) has been used in many commercial software developments. In order to provide technical support to end users, OSS projects manage a user mailing list. It is for discussion about bugs and new functions of OSS with end users. However, according to a survey of Japanese companies that use OSS to build their commercial software, the biggest problem is the lack of adequate technical support. In this study, we investigate what type of thread can get feedback in user mailing list. As a result of a case study using Apache and Python project data, a thread is posted by a deep experienced user would be received a useful answer. In addition, we found threads written about internal system information of the OSS is more likely to be replied.

A New Perspective on the Socialness in Bug Triaging: A Case Study of the Eclipse Platform Project
Masao Ohira and Hayato Yoshiyuki
(Wakayama University, Japan)
This paper explores how social relationships among developers impact on the efficiency of bug fixes. From the case study of the Eclipse Platform project, we found that (1) past achievements of bug triaging by particular pairs of assignors and fixers do not necessarily impact on the time to fix bugs, (2) rather, the time required to fix a bug can depend on who assigns the bug fixing task to a fixer. These findings would imply that we need to not only consider "who should fix this bug?" but also take into account a fixer's perspective "who should assign this bug?" or "who should ask to whom?", in order to better support the bug triaging process.

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