What Do Developers Want? An Advisor Approach for Developer Priorities

Sharma, Vibhu Saujanya; Mehra, Rohit; Kaulgud, Vikrant

doi:10.1109/chase.2017.14

Cited by 13 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…To ensure that the usage scenario of the Bot is as realistic as possible, we got the participants to ask questions that have been identified in the literature as being of importance to developers [13,12,18,42,11,43] and use repository data from real projects, in this case Hibernate-ORM and KAFKA. To compare, we also asked the participants to answer the same questions without using the bot, which we call the baseline comparison.…”

Section: Fig 2 Bot Interfacementioning

confidence: 99%

“…We found a number of notable and highly cited studies, such as the study by Begel and Zimmermann [13,12], which reported questions commonly asked by practitioners at Microsoft, the study by Fritz and Murphy [18] that conducted interviews with software developers to determine questions that developers ask and the study by Sharma et. al [42], which prioritized the importance of questions that developers ask. We also surveyed a number of other studies whose goal was not directly related to questions that developers ask, but which we found to be relevant for us to understand which questions we should ask (e.g., [11,43]).…”

Section: Questions Supported By the Botmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Developers may want to know what are the last things that changed in a file/class to be up o date before they make modifications. [42,18,12] Q9. What are the commits related to File Name?…”

Section: Questions Supported By the Botmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Developers who have questions about a specific file or class may want to speak to the person who created it. [43,42] Q14. Which developer(s) have the most unfixed bugs?…”

Section: Questions Supported By the Botmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The approach contains five main components, a user interaction component, meant to interact with the user; entity recognizer and intent extractor components, meant to process and analyze the user's natural language input; a knowledge base component, that contains all of the data and information to be queried; and a response generator component, meant to generate a reply message that contains the query's answer and return it to the user interaction component. To evaluate our bot approach, we add support for 15 of the most commonly asked questions by software practitioners mentioned in prior work [43,11,42,13,18]. We perform a survey based on a user study with 12 participants.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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MSRBot: Using bots to answer questions from software repositories

Abdellatif¹,

Badran²,

Shihab³

2020

Empir Software Eng

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Software repositories contain a plethora of useful information that can be used to enhance software projects. Prior work has leveraged repository data to improve many aspects of the software development process, such as, help extract requirement decisions, identify potentially defective code and improve maintenance and evolution. However, in many cases, practitioners are not able to fully benefit from software repositories due to the fact that they need special expertise and dedicated effort to mine their repositories.Therefore, in this paper, we use bots to automate and ease the process of extracting useful information from software repositories. Particularly, we lay out an approach of how bots, layered on top of software repositories, can be used to answer some of the most common software development/maintenance questions facing developers. We perform a preliminary study with 12 participants to validate the effectiveness of the bot. Our findings indicate that using bots achieves very promising results in terms of answer accuracy, speed and usefulness. Our work has the potential to transform the MSR field by significantly lowering the barrier to entry, making the extraction of useful information from software repositories as easy as chatting with a bot.

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Section: Fig 2 Bot Interfacementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Questions Supported By the Botmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Developers may want to know what are the last things that changed in a file/class to be up o date before they make modifications. [42,18,12] Q9. What are the commits related to File Name?…”

Section: Questions Supported By the Botmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Developers who have questions about a specific file or class may want to speak to the person who created it. [43,42] Q14. Which developer(s) have the most unfixed bugs?…”

Section: Questions Supported By the Botmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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MSRBot: Using bots to answer questions from software repositories

Abdellatif¹,

Badran²,

Shihab³

2020

Empir Software Eng

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Data visualisation in continuous integration and delivery: Information needs, challenges, and recommendations

2021

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Several operations, ranging from regular code updates to compiling, building, testing, and distribution to customers, are consolidated in continuous integration and delivery. Professionals seek additional information to complete the mission at hand during these tasks. Developers who devote a large amount of time and effort to finding such information may become distracted from their work. We will better understand the processes, procedures, and resources used to deliver a quality product on time by defining the types of information that software professionals seek. A deeper understanding of software practitioners' information needs has many advantages, including remaining competitive, growing knowledge of issues that can stymie a timely update, and creating a visualisation tool to assist practitioners in addressing their information needs. This is an extension of a previous work done by the authors. The authors conducted a multiple-case holistic study with six different companies (38 unique participants) to identify information needs in continuous integration and delivery. This study attempts to capture the importance, frequency, required effort (e.g. sequence of actions required to collect information), current approach to handling, and associated stakeholders with respect to identified needs. 27 information needs associated with different stakeholders (i.e. developers, testers, project managers, release team, and compliance authority) were identified. The identified needs were categorised as testing, code & commit, confidence, bug, and artefacts. Apart from identifying information needs, practitioners face several challenges in developing visualisation tools. Thus, 8 challenges that were faced by the practitioners to develop/maintain visualisation tools for the software team were identified. The recommendations from practitioners who are experts in developing, maintaining, and providing visualisation services to the software team were listed.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

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