Communication in open-source projects-end of the e-mail era?

Käfer, Verena; Graziotin, Daniel; Bogicevic, Ivan; Wagner, Stefan; Ramadani, Jasmin

doi:10.1145/3183440.3194951

Cited by 16 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Following an inductive approach, we wanted to be as openminded as possible. From another study [20], we already knew that projects provide a large variety of channels. Additionally, we wanted to explore any other issue related to communication channels in GitHub projects.…”

Section: Research Objectivementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, we wanted to explore any other issue related to communication channels in GitHub projects. Käfer et al [20] analyzed communication channels in GitHub projects. They have shown that only half of the analyzed projects use externally visible communication channels.…”

Section: Research Objectivementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previously, mailing lists were very common [25]. Nowadays, other communication channels become more and more popular [20,31], for example, Slack [21], issue trackers [14], Twitter [26] or Gitter [23].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

How Are Communication Channels on GitHub Presented to Their Intended Audience? -- A Thematic Analysis

Ebert¹,

Graziotin²,

Wagner³

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

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Communication is essential in software development, and even more in distributed settings. Communication activities need to be organized and coordinated to defend against the threat of productivity losses, increases in cognitive load, and stress among team members. With a plethora of communication channels that were identified by previous research in open-source projects, there is a need to explore organizational issues in how these communication channels are introduced, explained, and motivated for use among all project members. In this study, we wanted to understand which communication channels are used in GitHub projects and how they are presented to the GitHub project audience. We employed thematic analysis to analyze 151 artifacts in 90 GitHub projects. Our results revealed 32 unique communications channels that can be divided into nine different types. Projects mostly provide channels of different types, but for some types (e.g., chat) it is common to provide several channels. Maintainers are aware that channels have different properties and help the developers to decide which channel should be used in which case. However, this is not true for all projects, and often we have not found any explicit reasons why maintainers chose to provide one channel over another. Different channels can be used for different purposes and have different affordances, so maintainers have to decide wisely which channels they want to provide and make clear which channel should be used in which case. Otherwise, developers might feel overwhelmed of too many channels and information can get fragmented over multiple channels [31]. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Open source software; • Software and its engineering → Collaboration in software development.

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Section: Research Objectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Research Objectivementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

How Are Communication Channels on GitHub Presented to Their Intended Audience? -- A Thematic Analysis

Ebert¹,

Graziotin²,

Wagner³

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Many OSS communities utilize Gitter [31] or Slack [32] as their live communication means. In particular, Gitter is currently the most popular online communication platform [37] since it provides open access to public chat rooms and free access to historical data [49]. Considering the popular, open, and free access nature, we conduct this study based on Gitter 2 .…”

Section: The Gitter Platformmentioning

confidence: 99%

A first look at developers’ live chat on Gitter

Shi

Chen

Yang

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Softw

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Modern communication platforms such as Gitter and Slack play an increasingly critical role in supporting software teamwork, especially in open source development. Conversations on such platforms often contain intensive, valuable information that may be used for better understanding OSS developer communication and collaboration. However, little work has been done in this regard. To bridge the gap, this paper reports a first comprehensive empirical study on developers' live chat, investigating when they interact, what community structures look like, which topics are discussed, and how they interact. We manually analyze 749 dialogs in the first phase, followed by an automated analysis of over 173K dialogs in the second phase. We find that developers tend to converse more often on weekdays, especially on Wednesdays and Thursdays (UTC), that there are three common community structures observed, that developers tend to discuss topics such as API usages and errors, and that six dialog interaction patterns are identified in the live chat communities. Based on the findings, we provide recommendations for individual developers and OSS communities, highlight desired features for platform vendors, and shed light on future research directions. We believe that the findings and insights will enable a better understanding of developers' live chat, pave the way for other researchers, as well as a better utilization and mining of knowledge embedded in the massive chat history. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Open source model; • General and reference → Empirical studies.

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“…The authors argue that the system increased awareness of the software's build status and helped agile teams with self-supervision [19]. In modern software development, chat solutions have disrupted previous software development processes and have replaced email in some cases [9], [20]. Fitzpatrick et al combined the informal discussions developers have about code with version control information reporting code changes in a ticker tape form [21].…”

Section: A Software Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Additional Set of (Automated) Eyes: Chatbots for Agile Retrospectives

Matthies

Dobrigkeit

Hesse

2019

2019 IEEE/ACM 1st International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE)

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Recent advances in natural-language processing and data analysis allow software bots to become virtual team members, providing an additional set of automated eyes and additional perspectives for informing and supporting teamwork. In this paper, we propose employing chatbots in the domain of software development with a focus on supporting analyses and measurements of teams' project data. The software project artifacts produced by agile teams during regular development activities, e.g. commits in a version control system, represent detailed information on how a team works and collaborates. Analyses of this data are especially relevant for agile retrospective meetings, where adaptations and improvements to the executed development process are discussed. Development teams can use these measurements to track the progress of identified improvement actions over development iterations. Chatbots provide a convenient user interface for interacting with the outcomes of retrospectives and the associated measurements in a chat-based channel that is already being employed by team members.

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Communication in open-source projects-end of the e-mail era?

Cited by 16 publications

References 7 publications

How Are Communication Channels on GitHub Presented to Their Intended Audience? -- A Thematic Analysis

How Are Communication Channels on GitHub Presented to Their Intended Audience? -- A Thematic Analysis

A first look at developers’ live chat on Gitter

An Additional Set of (Automated) Eyes: Chatbots for Agile Retrospectives

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