Software developers understanding and exploring code spend much of their time asking questions and searching for answers. Yet little has been known about the questions devel-‐ opers ask, the strategies used to answer them, and the challenges developers face. Through interviews, surveys, and observations, a series of 7 studies were conducted that begin to address this gap, contributing a better understanding of developers ’ tools, practices, prob-‐ lems, questions, and strategies, and a model of how developers reconstruct design decisions from code. A design process is described for using studies of developers ’ work to design more useful tools for developers. These studies reveal that reachability questions are a central part of understanding and ex-‐ ploring code. A reachability question is a search along paths through code. Developers ask reachability questions when reasoning about causality, ordering, type membership, repeti-‐ tion, and choice. For example, to debug a deadlock, a developer searched downstream for calls acquiring resources to reconstruct how and why resources were acquired. Existing tools make these questions challenging to answer by forcing developers to guess which

Development teams who work with others need to be aware of what everyone is doing in order to manage the risk of taking on dependencies. Using newsfeeds of software development activities mined from software repositories, teams can find relevant information to help them make well-informed decisions that affect the success of their endeavors. In this paper, we describe the architecture of a newsfeed system that we are currently building on top of the Codebook software repository mining platform. We discuss the design, construction and aggregation of newsfeeds, and include other important aspects such as summarization, filtering, context, and privacy. Categories and Subject Descriptors:

Abstract—Recommender systems are becoming increasingly popular. As these systems become commonplace and the number of users increases, it will become important for these systems to be able to cope with a large and diverse set of users whose recommendation needs may be very different from each other. In particular, large scale recommender systems will need to ensure that users ’ requests for recommendations can be answered with low response times and high throughput. In this paper, we explore how to use caches and cached data mining to improve the performance of recommender systems by improving throughput and reducing response time for providing recommendations. We describe the structure of our cache, which can be viewed as a prefetch cache that prefetches all types of supported recommendations, and how it is used in our recommender system. We also describe the results of our empirical study to measure the efficacy of our cache. Keywords-data mining, caching, recommender systems, empirical study I.

Designing useful tools for developers requires identifying and understanding an important problem developers face and designing a solution that addresses this problem. This paper describes a design process that uses data to understand problems, design solutions, and evaluate solutions’ usefulness. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.6 [Software

Social media has changed the way that people collaborate and share information. In this paper, we highlight its impact for enabling new ways for software teams to form and work together. Individuals will self-organize within and across organizational boundaries. Grassroots software development communities will emerge centered around new technologies, common processes and attractive target markets. Companies consisting of lone individuals will able to leverage social media to conceive of, design, develop, and deploy successful and profitable product lines. A challenge for researchers who are interested in studying, influencing, and supporting this shift in software teaming is to make sure that their research methods protect the privacy and reputation of their stakeholders.

In this demo, we describe WhoseIsThat, a social search portal which we built using the Codebook framework. We improve the search experience in two ways: first, we search across multiple software repositories at once with a single query; second, we return not just a list of artifacts in the results, but also engineers. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.2.9 [Software Engineering]: Management—productivity; H.5.2

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.

Abstract—Large-scale software engineering requires many teams to collaborate together to create software products. The problems these teams suffer trying to coordinate their joint work can be addressed through tools inspired by social networking. Social networking tools help people to more easily discover and more efficiently maintain relationships than is feasible using one-to-one or face-to-face interactions. Applying these ideas to the software domain requires new kinds and combinations of software program and process analyses that overcome intrinsic limitations in the accuracy of the underlying data sources and the ambiguity inherent in human relationships. Keywords-software process, human aspects I.

The major goal of software development is to deliver high-quality software efficiently. To achieve this goal of delivering high-quality software efficiently, programmers often reuse existing frameworks or libraries, hereby referred to as libraries, instead of developing similar code artifacts from the scratch. However, programmers often face challenges in reusing existing libraries due to two major factors. First, many existing libraries are not well-documented. Even when such documentations exist, they are often outdated. Second, many existing libraries expose a large number of application programming interfaces (APIs), which represent interfaces through which libraries expose their functionalities. For example, the.NET base library provides nearly 10,000 API classes. Due to these two preceding factors, there exist three major problems that affect both software productivity and quality. First, programmers often spend more time in reusing existing libraries, thereby reducing software productivity. Second, programmers introduce defects while using APIs due to lack of proper knowledge on how to reuse those APIs. Third, existing white-box test generation techniques face challenges in effectively generating test inputs for the client code that reuses libraries. To address these three preceding issues, in this dissertation, we propose a general framework,

Abstract—When software developers need to exchange information or coordinate work with colleagues on other teams, they are often faced with the challenge of finding the right person to communicate with. In this paper, we present our tool, called CARES (Colleagues and Relevant Engineers ’ Support), which is an integrated development environment-based (IDE) tool that enables engineers to easily discover and communicate with the people who have contributed to the source code. CARES has been deployed to 30 professional developers, and we interviewed 8 of them after 3 weeks of evaluation. They reported that CARES helped them to more quickly find, choose, and initiate contact with the most relevant and expedient person who could address their needs. Keywords-coordination, CSCW, software engineering I.