Software developers use many different communication tools and channels in their work. The diversity of these tools has dramatically increased over the past decade, giving rise to a wide range of socially enabled communication channels and social media that developers use to support their activities. The availability of such social tools is leading to a participatory culture of software development, where developers want to engage with, learn from, and co-create software with other developers. However, the interplay of these social channels, as well as the opportunities and challenges they may create when used together within this participatory development culture, are not yet well understood. In this paper, we report on a large-scale survey conducted with 1,449 GitHub users. We describe which channels these developers find essential to their work and gain an understanding of the challenges they face using them. Our findings lay the empirical foundation for providing recommendations to developers and tool designers on how to use and improve tools for developers.

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The microblogging service Twitter has over 500 million users posting over 500 million tweets daily. Research has established that software developers use Twitter in their work, but this has not yet been examined in detail. Twitter is an important medium in some software engineering circlesunderstanding its use could lead to improved support, and learning more about the reasons for non-adoption could inform the design of improved tools.In a qualitative study, we surveyed 271 and interviewed 27 developers active on GitHub. We find that Twitter helps them keep up with the fast-paced development landscape. They use it to stay aware of industry changes, for learning, and for building relationships. We discover the challenges they experience and extract their coping strategies. Some developers do not want to or cannot embrace Twitter for their work-we show their reasons and alternative channels. We validate our findings in a follow-up survey with more than 1,200 respondents.

Software developers pursue a wide range of activities as part of their work, and making sense of what they did in a given time frame is far from trivial as evidenced by the large number of awareness and coordination tools that have been developed in recent years. To inform tool design for making sense of the information available about a developer's activity, we conducted an empirical study with 156 GitHub users to investigate what information they would expect in a summary of development activity, how they would measure development activity, and what factors influence how such activity can be condensed into textual summaries or numbers. We found that unexpected events are as important as expected events in summaries of what a developer did, and that many developers do not believe in measuring development activity. Among the factors that influence summarization and measurement of development activity, we identified development experience and programming languages.