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7th International Workshop on Social Software Engineering (SSE 2015), September 1, 2015, Bergamo, Italy

SSE 2015 – Proceedings

Contents - Abstracts - Authors
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FSEconf

Frontmatter

Title Page


Foreword
The Workshop on Social Software Engineering (SSE) focuses on the interplay between social computing and software engineering. On one hand, social factors in software engineering activities, processes and tools are useful for improving the quality of development processes and the software produced by them. Examples include the role of group awareness and multi-cultural factors in collaborative software development. On the other hand, social software mediates people-to-people communication, supporting human choices, actions and interactions with each other. Social software needs to accommodate a wide range of social concepts, such as trust, governance, reputation, and privacy. Being social, the software would also need to be receptive to users’ choices and give them a voice in the design, operation and evolution decisions. The SSE workshop brings together academic and industrial perspectives to provide models, methods, tools and approaches to address these issues.

Social Factors in Software Development

Communicating Software Testing Culture through Visualizing Testing Activity
Raphael Pham, Jonas Mörschbach, and Kurt Schneider
(Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany)
Inexperienced developers, for example new graduates joining a software development company, have difficulties applying their software testing knowledge. They lack hands-on experience and often have a dismissive attitude towards systematic testing, which hinders their adoption of testing activities. If the novice cannot quickly adopt a healthy testing culture during the onboarding phase, her progress as a high-quality engineer may be hindered. Here, cues from social coding sites can potentially help: Simple signs of a team’s testing culture can facilitate more testing by contributors. We propose to make the team’s testing culture visible by strategically employing traits of social transparency. We introduce six dashboard-like testing signals into the novice’s IDE and prominently display how senior developers are testing. A preliminary evaluation with 24 soon-to-be Bachelor graduates showed encouraging results: Being reminded of their lagging test progress induced a need to test more. Visual comparison to colleagues’ testing performance woke competitive feelings in students and made them want to write more test.

Towards GEEZMO: hiGh-frEquEncy Zest and Mood-pOlling for Proactive Software Development Problem-Solving
Elisabetta Di Nitto, Raffaela Mirandola, Santi Raffa, and Damian A. Tamburri
(Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Development of software is happening on an increasingly distributed fashion. Individuals normally coordinate and interact over any combination of IRC rooms, mailing lists, private email, etc. Conversely, big players like Google Inc. employ yearly Googlegeist polls asking its employees how they feel about the company, its directions and its managers. As a consequence, the amount of time required for managers and management to feel the pulse of their subordinates is removed from actual work. We argue that software development status can be computed by eliciting just a few bits of information that can be anonymously extracted by a single poll - the poll can be completed very quickly and its administration can happen as a simple prompt inside windows that developers would be visiting anyway (e.g., the log-in screen, commit screens, etc.). This paper elaborates this idea and develops a prototype to articulate the idea in practice. Finally, the idea is discussed using a preliminary validation by means of statistical methods and simulations.

The Role of Social Interactions in Value Creation in Agile Software Development Processes
Hiva Alahyari
(Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
This position paper presents an emerging research based on a set of expressed statements and impressions from conducted empirical research during the past few years. Agile software development emphasizes on social aspects through its methods and principles. In order to improve the processes within the organization and amongst various stakeholders, there is a need for social processes and various types of interactions to be studied in the context of agile development. The objective of this paper is to present the need to conduct more empirical studies to investigate the socialness of software engineering processes and in particular the role of various type of social interactions in improving development processes and therefore creating more value in organizations.

Could Social Factors Influence the Effort Software Estimation?
Valentina Lenarduzzi
(Free University of Bolzano, Italy)
Effort estimation is often influenced by several factors, including social. This study aims at understanding the interactions between social factors and effort during effort estimation. I want to analyze the dynamics that occur when a developer estimates the effort for a specific task and the influence of the work team and the work conditions. I conducted a semi-structured interview among three different projects with different developers working in Agile and Scrum processes, asking them which factors and social aspects they take in to account when they estimate the effort during the development processes. Results show an important influence of social factors during the effort estimation phase, and call for future works for a large scale Survey for a more accurate identification.

Social Developer

Understanding the Affect of Developers: Theoretical Background and Guidelines for Psychoempirical Software Engineering
Daniel Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson
(Free University of Bolzano, Italy; NTNU, Norway)
Affects--emotions and moods--have an impact on cognitive processing activities and the working performance of individuals. It has been established that software development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processing activities. Therefore, we have proposed to employ psychology theory and measurements in software engineering (SE) research. We have called it "psychoempirical software engineering". However, we found out that existing SE research has often fallen into misconceptions about the affect of developers, lacking in background theory and how to successfully employ psychological measurements in studies. The contribution of this paper is threefold. (1) It highlights the challenges to conduct proper affect-related studies with psychology; (2) it provides a comprehensive literature review in affect theory; and (3) it proposes guidelines for conducting psychoempirical software engineering.

The Challenges of Sentiment Detection in the Social Programmer Ecosystem
Nicole Novielli, Fabio Calefato, and Filippo Lanubile
(University of Bari, Italy)
A recent research trend has emerged to study the role of affect in in the social programmer ecosystem, by applying sentiment analysis to the content available in sites such as GitHub and Stack Overflow. In this paper, we aim at assessing the suitability of a state-of-the-art sentiment analysis tool, already applied in social computing, for detecting affective expressions in Stack Overflow. We also aim at verifying the construct validity of choosing sentiment polarity and strength as an appropriate way to operationalize affective states in empirical studies on Stack Overflow. Finally, we underline the need to overcome the limitations induced by domain-dependent use of lexicon that may produce unreliable results.

The Social Developer: Now, Then, and Tomorrow
Terhi Kilamo, Marko Leppänen, and Tommi Mikkonen
(Tampere University of Technology, Finland)
The practice of software engineering needs both individual commitment as well as social interaction. It has long been widely recognized that communication problems are a major factor in the delay and failure of software projects. However, the patterns of communication that can be associated with the different development paradigms have gained less attention. In this paper, we present some views to the evolution of social dimensions in the light of software engineering methodologies and associated tools. To study this, we have surveyed a number of software developers working in industry to reflect our views into the state-of-practice in software development companies and shed light to the impact of distributed and agile development has had on developer communication. Towards the end of the paper, we provide some ideas for future research and draw some final conclusions.

Preparing Next Generation of Software Engineers for Future Societal Challenges and Opportunities
Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic
(Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden; University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
As a global community we are facing number of existential challenges like global warming, deficit of basic commodities, environmental degradation and other threats to life on earth, as well as possible unintended consequences of AI, nano-technology, biotechnology, and similar. Among world-wide responses to those challenges the framework programme for European research and technological development, Horizon 2020, have formulated the Science with and for Society Work Programme, based on Responsible Research and Innovation with a goal to support research contributing to the progress of humanity and preventing catastrophic events and their consequences. This goal may only be reached if we educate responsible researchers and engineers with both deep technical knowledge and broad disciplinary and social competence. From the perspective of experiences at two Swedish Universities, this paper argues for the benefits of teaching professional ethics and sustainable development to engineering students.

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