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By surveying recommendation systems in software development, we found that existing approaches have been focusing on "you might like what similar developers like" scenarios. However structured artifacts and semantically well-defined development activities bear large potentials for further recommendation scenarios. We introduce a novel "landscape" of software development recommendation systems and line out several scenarios for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Basic challenges are improving context-awareness and particularly addressing information providers.

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Developers take notes about their work sessions, either to remember the work status and share it with collaborators, or because employers explicitly require this for project management matters. We report on an exploratory study which aims at understanding how software developers describe their work. We analyzed more than 750,000 work descriptions of about 2,000 professionals taken over 8 years in three settings. We observed several similarities in the content and time meta-data of work descriptions. Most frequent terms, such as top-30 performed activities, are used consistently. Particular templates such as "ACTION concerning ARTIFACT because of CAUSE" occur frequently. Developers described sessions that last 30-120 min. 4-16 times a day. Maintaining diaries seems to consume between 3-6% of the total work time, and in 10% of the sessions, developers did not describe their work in sufficient detail. We argue that our results make the first step towards automatically generating work diaries for software developers.

Modeling is an important aspect of information system development, allowing for abstract descriptions of systems and processes. Therefore, models are often characterized as communication artifacts between different stakeholders in a development process. However, modeling as such has turned out to be a specialist activity, requiring skills in arcane modeling languages and complex tools.In this paper, we suggest and present an approach for collaborative, Wiki-based modeling of process models and UML (class-)diagrams. While other web-based "lightweight" modeling tools are available, our approach consequently follows the Wikiparadigm and allows us to semantically process the modeled information building upon Semantic MediaWiki.