Large-scale software engineering requires communication and collaboration to successfully build and ship products. We conducted a survey with Microsoft engineers on inter-team coordination and found that the most impactful problems concerned finding and keeping track of other engineers. Since engineers are connected by their shared work, a tool that discovers connections in their work-related repositories can help. Here we describe the Codebook framework for mining software repositories. It is flexible enough to address all of the problems identified by our survey with a single data structure (graph of people and artifacts) and a single algorithm (regular language reachability). Codebook handles a larger variety of problems than prior work, analyzes more kinds of work artifacts, and can be customized by and for end-users. To evaluate our framework’s flexibility, we built two applications, Hoozizat and Deep Intellisense. We evaluated these applications with engineers to show effectiveness in addressing multiple inter-team coordination problems. Categories and Subject Descriptors:

Today's generation of software developers frequently make use of social media, either as an adjunct or integrated into a wide range of tools ranging from code editors and issue trackers, to IDEs and web-based portals. The role of social media usage in software engineering is not well understood, and yet the use of these mechanisms influences software development practices. In this position paper, we advocate for research that strives to understand the benefits, risks and limitations of using social media in software development at the team, project and community levels. Guided by the implications of current tools and social media features, we propose a set of pertinent research questions around community involvement, project coordination and management, as well as individual software development activities. Answers to these questions will guide future software engineering tool innovations and software development team practices.

In practice, many people have to work together to develop and maintain a software system. However, the programmer’s key tool, the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), is a solo-tool, serving to help individual programmers understand and modify the system. Such an IDE does not leverage the knowledge other team members may have of the design and implementation of the system. We propose to resolve this problem by exploring, experimentally, new ways of inferring knowledge from past IDE-interactions, and of maximizing collaboration among developers. Our approach,

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:

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

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.

Abstract—Code duplication is common in current programming-practice: programmers search for snippets of code, incorporate them into their projects and then modify them to their needs. In today’s practice, no automated scheme is in place to inform both parties of any distant changes of the code. As code snippets continue to evolve both on the side of the user and on the side of the author, both may wish to benefit from remote bug fixes or refinements — authors may be interested in the actual usage of their code snippets, and researchers could gather information on clone usage. We propose to maintain a link between software clones across repositories and outline how the links can be created and maintained. Index Terms—clone detection; software maintenance; corrective clone management