Software Engineering Commons^™

What Collaboration Means To Me: From Coordination To Collective Action: Cclp And Cyclops As Infrastructure For Collaborative Collection Stewardship, Boaz Nadav-Manes

Collaborative Librarianship

Academic libraries face growing pressure to manage complex collections under significant resource constraints. While consortial collaboration has long been recognized as a strategic response, existing models remain limited, often failing to influence the full collections lifecycle. This article examines how the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP) and the Cyclops platform together offer a new model for moving beyond coordination toward genuine collective action in collection stewardship. CCLP provides a community-governed framework structuring collaboration from selection and acquisition through preservation and deaccessioning, while Cyclops complements it with an open, analytics-driven infrastructure that aggregates data across institutions, enabling cross-institutional analysis and translating …

A Case Study Of Gender And Online Team Communication In Software Engineering Education, Rita Garcia, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaboration is crucial in Software Engineering (SE), yet factors like gender bias can shape team dynamics and behaviours. This descriptive case study examines an eight-week project involving 39 SE students across eight teams contributing to GitHub projects. Focusing on gender, we used a mixed-methods approach to analyse Slack communications, identifying gender differences in how students respond to initiated communications and comparing how students’ communications influenced other aspects of students’ performance, including learning gains. We found higher help-seeking and leadership behaviours in the all-woman team involved in this case study, while men responded more slowly. Although communication did not directly affect …

Quid Pro Quo: An Exploration Of Reciprocity In Code Review, Carlos Gavidia-Calderon, Donggyun Han, Amel Bennaceur

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore the role of reciprocity in code review processes. Reciprocity manifests itself in two ways: 1) reviewing code for others translates to accepted code contributions, and 2) having contributions accepted increases the reviews made for others. We use vector autoregressive (VAR) models to explore the causal relation between reviews performed and accepted contributions. After fitting VAR models for 24 active open-source developers, we found evidence of reciprocity in 6 of them. These results suggest reciprocity does play a role in code review, that can potentially be exploited to increase reviewer participation.

Gender Influence On Communication Initiated Within Student Teams, Rita Garcia, Chieh-Ju Trinity Liao, Ariane Pearce, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaboration is important during software development, but related work has found gender differences can influence the collaboration process, creating inequality in the team’s dynamics. In this paper, we present a gender analysis study that involved 39 students, examining their teams’ online collaborations while contributing to a large open-source software project. Eight teams of 4-6 Software Engineering (SE) students communicated over an online messaging platform, Slack, to complete an eight-week project. The goal of this study is to identify gender differences emerging from team collaboration. A mixed-methods approach was used to collect students’ teamwork experiences and analyse their collaboration. Our research …

Investigating Collaboration In Software Reverse Engineering, Allison M. Wong

Theses and Dissertations

Reverse engineering (RE) is a rigorous process of exploration and analysis to support software design recovery and exploit development. The process is often conducted in teams to divide the workload and take full advantage of engineers' individual expertise and strengths. Collaboration in RE requires versatile and reliable tools that can match the environment's unpredictable and fluid nature. While studies on collaborative software development have indicated common best practices and implementations, similar standards have not been explored in reverse engineering. This research conducts semi-structured interviews with reverse engineering experts to understand their needs and solutions while working in a team. The …

The Impact Of Dynamics Of Collaborative Software Engineering On Introverts: A Study Protocol, Ingrid Nunes, Christoph Treude, Fabio Calefato

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: Collaboration among software engineers through face-to-face discussions in teams has been promoted since the adoption of agile methods. However, these discussions might demote the contribution of software engineers who are introverts, possibly leading to sub-optimal solutions and creating work environments that benefit extroverts. Objective: We aim to evaluate whether providing software engineers with time to work individually and reason about a collective problem is a setting that makes introverts more comfortable to interact and contribute more, ultimately leading to better solutions. Method: We plan to conduct a between-subjects study, with teams in a control group that design a software …

Chaff From The Wheat: Characterizing And Determining Valid Bug Reports, Yuanrui Fan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ahmed E. Hassan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers use bug reports to triage and fix bugs. When triaging a bug report, developers must decide whether the bug report is valid (i.e., a real bug). A large amount of bug reports are submitted every day, with many of them end up being invalid reports. Manually determining valid bug report is a difficult and tedious task. Thus, an approach that can automatically analyze the validity of a bug report and determine whether a report is valid can help developers prioritize their triaging tasks and avoid wasting time and effort on invalid bug reports. In this study, motivated by the …

An Application Of Game Theory In Distributed Collaborative Decision Making, Angran Xiao

Publications and Research

In a distributed product realization environment, new paradigms and accompanying software systems are necessary to support the collaborative work of geographically dispersed engineering teams from different disciplines who have different knowledge, experience, tools and resources. To verify the concept of collaboration by separation, we propose a generic information communication medium to enable knowledge representation and exchange between engineering teams, a digital interface. Across digital interfaces, each engineering team maintains its own perspective towards the product realization problem, and each controls a subset of design variables and seeks to maximize its own payoff function subject to individual constraints. Hence, we postulate …

Creating A Reproducible Metadata Transformation Pipeline Using Technology Best Practices, Cara Key, Mike Waugh

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Over the course of two years, a team of librarians and programmers from LSU Libraries migrated the 186 collections of the Louisiana Digital Library from OCLC's CONTENTdm platform over to the open-source Islandora platform.

Early in the process, the team understood the value of creating a reproducible metadata transformation pipeline, because there were so many unknowns at the beginning of the process along with the certainty that mistakes would be made. This presentation will describe how the team used innovative and collaborative tools, such as Trello, Ansible, Vagrant, VirtualBox, git and GitHub to accomplish the task.

Crowdservice: Optimizing Mobile Crowdsourcing And Service Composition, Xin Peng, Jingxiao Gu, Tian Huat Tan, Jun Sun, Yijun Yu, Bashar Nuseibeh, Wenyun Zhao Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Some user needs can only be met by leveraging the capabilities of others to undertake particular tasks that require intelligence and labor. Crowdsourcing such capabilities is one way to achieve this. But providing a service that leverages crowd intelligence and labor is a challenge, since various factors need to be considered to enable reliable service provisioning. For example, the selection of an optimal set of workers from those who bid to perform a task needs to be made based on their reliability, expected reward, and distance to the target locations. Moreover, for an application involving multiple services, the overall cost …

A Preliminary Evaluation Of A Gamification Framework To Jump Start Collaboration Behavior Change, Flavio Steffens, Sabrina Marczak, Fernando Figueira Filho, Christoph Treude, Cleidson R. B. Da Souza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this notes paper we report on a preliminary qualitative evaluation of a gamification framework to address collaboration issues in software engineering. Findings suggest that the use of game elements indeed is prone to motivate software developers to foster the resolution of collaboration issues in their teams. Our preliminary results motivated us to design large scale, in-depth, and longitudinal studies to further evaluate the framework. In a long run, we expect that our findings will be informative for project managers and tool designers and anyone else who is interested in helping software teams to overcome collaboration barriers and succeed on …

Collaboration Trumps Homophily In Urban Mobile Crowdsourcing, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Randy Tandriansyah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper establishes the power of dynamic collaborative task completion among workers for urban mobile crowdsourcing. Collaboration is defined via the notion of peer referrals, whereby a worker who has accepted a location-specific task, but is unlikely to visit that location, offloads the task to a willing friend. Such a collaborative framework might be particularly useful for task bundles, especially for bundles that have higher geographic dispersion. The challenge, however, comes from the high similarity observed in the spatiotemporal pattern of task completion among friends. Using extensive real-world crowd-sourcing studies conducted over 7 weeks and 1000+ workers on a campus-based …

Collaboration Trumps Homophily In Urban Mobile Crowd-Sourcing, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Randy Tandriansyah Daratan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper establishes the power of dynamic collaborative task completion among workers for urban mobile crowdsourcing. Collaboration is defined via the notion of peer referrals, whereby a worker who has accepted a location-specific task, but is unlikely to visit that location, offloads the task to a willing friend. Such a collaborative framework might be particularly useful for task bundles, especially for bundles that have higher geographic dispersion. The challenge, however, comes from the high similarity observed in the spatiotemporal pattern of task completion among friends. Using extensive real-world crowd-sourcing studies conducted over 7 weeks and 1000+ workers on a campus-based …

How To Break An Api: Cost Negotiation And Community Values In Three Software Ecosystems, Christopher Bogart, Christian K\303\244stner, James Herbsleb, Ferdian Thung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Change introduces conict into software ecosystems: breaking changes may ripple through the ecosystem and trigger rework for users of a package, but often developers can invest additional effort or accept opportunity costs to alleviate or delay downstream costs. We performed a multiple case study of three software ecosystems with different tooling and philosophies toward change, Eclipse, R/CRAN, and Node.js/npm, to understand how developers make decisions about change and change-related costs and what practices, tooling, and policies are used. We found that all three ecosystems differ substantially in their practices and expectations toward change and that those differences can be explained …

A Campus-Scale Mobile Crowd-Tasking Platform, Nikita Jaiman, Archan Misra, Randy Tandriansyah Daratan, Thivya Kandappu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

By effectively utilizing smartphones to reach out and engage a large population of mobile users, mobile crowdsourcing can become a game-changer for many urban operations, such as last mile logistics and municipal monitoring. To overcome the uncertainties and risks associated with a purely best-effort, opportunistic model of such crowdsourcing, we advocate a more centrally-coordinated approach, that (a) takes into account the predicted movement paths of workers and (b) factors in typical human behavioral responses to various incentives and deadlines. To experimentally tackle these challenges, we design, develop and experiment with a real-world mobile crowd-Tasking platform on an urban campus in …

A Campus-Scale Mobile Crowd-Tasking Platform, Nikita Jaiman, Archan Misra, Randy Tandriansyah Daratan, Thivya Kandappu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

By effectively utilizing smartphones to reach out and engage a large population of mobile users, mobile crowdsourcing can become a game-changer for many urban operations, such as last mile logistics and municipal monitoring. To overcome the uncertainties and risks associated with a purely best-effort, opportunistic model of such crowdsourcing, we advocate a more centrally-coordinated approach, that (a) takes into account the predicted movement paths of workers and (b) factors in typical human behavioral responses to various incentives and deadlines. To experimentally tackle these challenges, we design, develop and experiment with a real-world mobile crowd-Tasking platform on an urban campus in …

Better Together

DePaul Magazine

Faculty have taken full advantage of the university's innovative intercollegiate grant program, and the resulting research is as interesting and diverse as the collaborators themselves. What is resulting is research on "Patient and Primary Care Provider Perspectives on Recreational and Therapeutic Cannabis Use Within a Changing Socioculltural and Political Context;" a new minor in climate change science and policy; a new class, Communication, Coding and Entrepreneurship; brain inflammation research; and the project "Cosmology Meets Continental Philosophy: Natural Laws and Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing"

Using Gamification As A Collaboration Motivator For Software Development Teams: A Preliminary Framework, Flavio Steffens, Sabrina Marczak, Fernando Figueira Filho, Christoph Treude, Leif Singer, David Redmiles, Ban Al-Ani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gamification is the use of game elements in non-game context to engage and to motivate people to achieve goals. Its use is becoming very popular in software development organizations due to work being based upon human-centric and brain-intensive activity. This paper presents the topics of collaboration and gamification in the context of software engineering, and proposes a framework that identifies the most common collaboration issues that affect software development teams, and how to apply game elements to motivate a change on their behaviors.

The Importance Of Being Isolated: An Empirical Study On Chromium Reviews, Subhajit Datta, Devarshi Bhatt, Manish Jain, Proshanta Sarkar, Santonu Sarkar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As large scale software development has become more collaborative, and software teams more globally distributed, several studies have explored how developer interaction influences software development outcomes. The emphasis so far has been largely on outcomes like defect count, the time to close modification requests etc. In the paper, we examine data from the Chromium project to understand how different aspects of developer discussion relate to the closure time of reviews. On the basis of analyzing reviews discussed by 2000+ developers, our results indicate that quicker closure of reviews owned by a developer relates to higher reception of information and insights …

Does Latitude Hurt While Longitude Kills? Geographical And Temporal Separation In A Large Scale Software Development Project, Patrick Wagstrom, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed software development allows firms to leverage cost advantages and place work near centers of competency. This distribution comes at a cost -- distributed teams face challenges from differing cultures, skill levels, and a lack of shared working hours. In this paper we examine whether and how geographic and temporal separation in a large scale distributed software development influences developer interactions. We mine the work item trackers for a large commercial software project with a globally distributed development team. We examine both the time to respond and the propensity of individuals to respond and find that when taken together, geographic …

How Many Researchers Does It Take To Make Impact? Mining Software Engineering Publication Data For Collaboration Insights, Subhajit Datta, Santonu Sarkar, Sajeev A. S. M., Nishant Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the three and half decades since the inception of organized research publication in software engineering, the discipline has gained a significant maturity. This journey to maturity has been guided by the synergy of ideas, individuals and interactions. In this journey software engineering has evolved into an increasingly empirical discipline. Empirical sciences involve significant collaboration, leading to large teams working on research problems. In this paper we analyze a corpus of 19,000+ papers, written by 21,000+ authors from 16 publication venues between 1975 to 2010, to understand what is the ideal team size that has produced maximum impact in software …

Energy-Efficient Collaborative Query Processing Framework For Mobile Sensing Services, Jin Yang, Tianli Mo, Lipyeow Lim, Kai Uwe Sattler, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many emerging context-aware mobile applications involve the execution of continuous queries over sensor data streams generated by a variety of on-board sensors on multiple personal mobile devices (aka smartphones). To reduce the energyoverheads of such large-scale, continuous mobile sensing and query processing, this paper introduces CQP, a collaborative query processing framework that exploits the overlap (in both the sensor sources and the query predicates) across multiple smartphones. The framework automatically identifies the shareable parts of multiple executing queries, and then reduces the overheads of repetitive execution and data transmissions, by having a set of 'leader' mobile nodes execute and disseminate …

Talk Versus Work: Characteristics Of Developer Collaboration On The Jazz Platform, Subhajit Datta, Renuka Sindhgatta, Bikram Sengupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

IBM's Jazz initiative offers a state-of-the-art collaborative development environment (CDE) facilitating developer interactions around interdependent units of work. In this paper, we analyze development data across two versions of a major IBM product developed on the Jazz platform, covering in total 19 months of development activity, including 17,000+ work items and 61,000+ comments made by more than 190 developers in 35 locations. By examining the relation between developer talk and work, we find evidence that developers maintain a reasonably high level of connectivity with peer developers with whom they share work dependencies, but the span of a developer's communication goes …

The Social Network Of Software Engineering Research, Subhajit Datta, Nishant Kumar, Santonu Sarkar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The social network perspective has served as a useful framework for studying scientific research collaboration in different disciplines. Although collaboration in computer science research has received some attention, software engineering research collaboration has remained unexplored to a large extent. In this paper, we examine the collaboration networks based on co-authorship information of papers from ten software engineering publication venues over the 1976-2010 time period. We compare time variations of certain parameters of these networks with corresponding parameters of collaboration networks from other disciplines. We also explore whether software engineering collaboration networks manifest symptoms of the small-world phenomenon, conform to the …

Work Item Tagging: Communicating Concerns In Collaborative Software Development, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In collaborative software development projects, work items are used as a mechanism to coordinate tasks and track shared development work. In this paper, we explore how “tagging,” a lightweight social computing mechanism, is used to communicate matters of concern in the management of development tasks. We present the results from two empirical studies over 36 and 12 months, respectively, on how tagging has been adopted and what role it plays in the development processes of several professional development projects with more than 1,000 developers in total. Our research shows that the tagging mechanism was eagerly adopted by the teams, and …

Second International Workshop On Web 2.0 For Software Engineering (Web2se 2011), Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey, Arie Van Deursen, Andrew Begel, Sue Black

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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 …

Evolution Of Developer Collaboration On The Jazz Platform: A Study Of A Large Scale Agile Project, Subhajit Datta, Renuka Sindhgatta, Bikram Sengupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaboration is a key aspect of the agile philosophy of software development. As a software system matures over iterations, trends of developer collaboration can offer valuable insights into project dynamics. In this paper, we study evolution of developer collaboration for a large scale agile project on the Jazz platform. We construct networks of collaboration based on developer affiliations across comments on work items and file changes; and then compare parameters of such networks with established results from networks of scientific collaborations. The comparisons illuminate interesting facets of developer collaboration on the Jazz platform. Such perception helps deeper understanding of the …

Awareness 2.0: Staying Aware Of Projects, Developers And Tasks Using Dashboards And Feeds, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development teams need to maintain awareness of various different aspects ranging from overall project status and process bottlenecks to current tasks and incoming artifacts. Currently, there is a lack of theoretical foundations to guide tool selection and tool design to best support awareness tasks. In this paper, we explore how the combination of highly configurable project, team and contributor dashboards along with individual event feeds is used to accomplish extensive awareness. Our results stem from an empirical study of several large development teams, with a detailed study of a team of 150 developers and additional data from another four …

Bridging Lightweight And Heavyweight Task Organization: The Role Of Tags In Adopting New Task Categories, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In collaborative software development projects, tasks are often used as a mechanism to coordinate and track shared development work. Modern development environments provide explicit support for task management where tasks are typically organized and managed through predefined categories. Although there have been many studies that analyze data available from task management systems, there has been relatively little work on the design of task management tools. In this paper we explore how tagging with freely assigned keywords provides developers with a lightweight mechanism to further categorize and annotate development tasks. We investigate how tags that are frequently used over a long …

Web2se: First Workshop On Web 2.0 For Software Engineering, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey, Kate Ehrlich, Arie Van Deursen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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. One goal of this workshop is to investigate how these technologies can improve software development practices. Some of these technologies have made their …