Web2SE 2011 – Proceedings

Foreword
Social software is built around an "architecture of participation" where user data is aggregated as a side-effect of using Web 2.0 applications. Web 2.0 implies that processes and tools are socially open, and that content can be used in several different contexts. Web 2.0 tools and technologies support interactive information sharing, data interoperability and user centered design. For instance, wikis, blogs, tags and feeds help us organize, manage and categorize content in an informal and collaborative way. Some of these technologies have made their way into collaborative software development processes and development platforms. These processes and environments are just scratching the surface of what can be done by incorporating Web 2.0 approaches and technologies into collaborative software development. Web 2.0 opens up new opportunities for developers to form teams and collaborate, but it also comes with challenges for developers and researchers. Web2SE aims to improve our understanding of how Web 2.0, manifested in technologies such as mashups or dashboards, can change the culture of collaborative software development.

Leveraging Social Media to Gather User Feedback for Software Development
Dejana Bajic and Kelly Lyons
(UserVoice, USA; University of Toronto, Canada)
Social media is impacting the way service offerings are deployed and delivered. Several social media service offerings have emerged in the past few years (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). At the same time, more traditional kinds of service offerings are finding creative ways of making use of social media techniques (e.g., Dell Community). In this research, we analyze how software companies are finding ways to use social media techniques to gather feedback from users collectively. The following four factors and the way they influence the use of social media are analyzed in depth: company size, transparency, software deployment, and number of social media tools in use. Results of our analysis of software vendors that gather collective user feedback in this way are presented, concluding with a discussion on which attributes influence the way social media is used for collecting user feedback.

Wikigramming: A Wiki-based Training Environment for Programming
Takashi Hattori
(Keio University, Japan)
Wiki is one of the most successful technologies in Web 2.0 because it is so simple that anyone can start using it instantly. The main aim of this research is to realize a collaborative programming environment that is as simple as Wiki. Each Wiki page contains source code of a Scheme function which is executed on the server. Users can edit any function at any time without complicated procedure, and see the results of their changes instantly. In order to avoid intentional or unintentional destruction of working programs, when users attempt to modify existing functions, the modified version must pass unit tests written by other users. Though changes are made anonymously, we can have some confidence if test cases are written by many users.

Supporting the Cooperation of End-User Programmers through Social Development Environments
Leif Singer and Kurt Schneider
(Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany)
Many programs are being created by end-users without formal training in programming. Spreadsheets are the most popular environment for this, but mashups which combine public services into new, albeit small applications are also becoming more and more popular. Research shows that end-user programmers make potentially costly mistakes. Yet initiatives that aim at bringing software engineering principles to end-users are still rudimentary. In particular, we see much unused potential in approaches that foster and support the cooperation among end-user programmers. Whereas the application of mechanisms from social software to software engineering problems is gaining traction, this has not yet been investigated sufficiently for end-user software engineering. This paper discusses how insights from Communities of Practice research may be implemented using mechanisms from recent developments in social software. From the implementation of the presented social mechanisms, we expect an improvement in cooperation and mutual help in communities of end-user programmers. We plan to combine this approach with lightweight variations of software engineering methods targeted at end-user programmers. This should lead to higher quality in the programs developed by these end-users, as good practices are more likely to spread.

Automatic Status Updates in Distributed Software Development
Abayomi King and Kelly Lyons
(University of Toronto, Canada)
This study investigates how automatic, real-time, user-centered awareness information can help distributed software development teams. We created an Eclipse plugin that automatically determines a user’s activity in their Eclipse IDE and publishes the activity information as the status of their instant messenger client. The status is updated in real-time every time the user changes his or her activities in their IDE. We evaluated this tool by demonstrating it to eighty-one academics and industry workers in the field of computer science and interviewing them about the perceived benefits and usefulness of the tool. The results reveal various factors that can impact a participant’s desire for increased awareness information. Despite these factors there was a general desire to improve awareness of users’ activities via the tool. There was also some indication that the tool might help with interruption management.

Measuring API Documentation on the Web
Chris Parnin and Christoph Treude
(Georgia Institute of Technology, USA; University of Victoria, Canada)
Software development blogs, developer forums and Q&A websites are changing the way software is documented. With these tools, developers can create and communicate knowledge and experiences without relying on a central authority to provide official documentation. Instead, any content created by a developer is just a web search away. To understand whether documentation via social media can replace or augment more traditional forms of documentation, we study the extent to which the methods of one particular API -- jQuery -- are documented on the Web. We analyze 1,730 search results and show that software development blogs in particular cover 87.9% of the API methods, mainly featuring tutorials and personal experiences about using the methods. Further, this effort is shared by a large group of developers contributing just a few blog posts. Our findings indicate that social media is more than a niche in software documentation, that it can provide high levels of coverage and that it gives readers a chance to engage with authors.

Towards Understanding Twitter Use in Software Engineering: Preliminary Findings, Ongoing Challenges and Future Questions
Gargi Bougie, Jamie Starke, Margaret-Anne Storey, and Daniel M. German
(University of Victoria, Canada)
There has been some research conducted around the motivation for the use of Twitter and the value brought by micro-blogging tools to individuals and business environments. This paper builds on our understanding of how the phenomenon affects the population which birthed the technology: Software Engineers. We find that the Software Engineering community extensively leverages Twitter's capabilities for conversation and information sharing and that use of the tool is notably different between distinct Software Engineering groups. Our work exposes topics for future research and outlines some of the challenges in exploring this type of data.

Web2SE 2011 – Proceedings

Second International Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering (Web2SE 2011)