Abstract
AbstractAnalyzing and understanding software developers’ work habits and resulting needs is an essential prerequisite to improve software development practice. In our research, we utilize different qualitative and quantitative research methods to empirically investigate three underexplored aspects of software development: First, we analyze how software developers use sketches and diagrams in their daily work and derive requirements for better tool support. Then, we explore to what degree developers copy code from the popular online platform Stack Overflow without adhering to license requirements and motivate why this behavior may lead to legal issues for affected open source software projects. Finally, we describe a novel theory of software development expertise and identify factors fostering or hindering the formation of such expertise. Besides, we report on methodological implications of our research and present the open dataset SOTorrent, which supports researchers in analyzing the origin, evolution, and usage of content on Stack Overflow. The common goal for all studies we conducted was to better understand software developers’ work practices. Our findings support researchers and practitioners in making data-informed decisions when developing new tools or improving processes related to either the specific work habits we studied or expertise development in general.
Highlights
A work habit, which is a “settled tendency or usual manner of behavior,” can positively or negatively influence software developers’ daily work
While the goal guiding all empirical studies we conducted was to gain a better understanding of software developers’ work practices, we drew different conclusions for each of the studied phenomena: Based on our results, we developed novel tool prototypes to better support software developers’ sketching and diagramming workflows, we reached out to developers to make them aware of possible licensing issues in their software projects due to code copied from Stack Overflow, and we provide recommendations for researchers, developers, and employers how to utilize our findings on software development expertise and its formation
In the third part of this research project, we present a first conceptual theory of software development expertise that is grounded in the related literature and three online surveys with software developers
Summary
A work habit, which is a “settled tendency or usual manner of behavior,” can positively or negatively influence software developers’ daily work. While the goal guiding all empirical studies we conducted was to gain a better understanding of software developers’ work practices, we drew different conclusions for each of the studied phenomena: Based on our results, we developed novel tool prototypes to better support software developers’ sketching and diagramming workflows, we reached out to developers to make them aware of possible licensing issues in their software projects due to code copied from Stack Overflow, and we provide recommendations for researchers, developers, and employers how to utilize our findings on software development expertise and its formation. At the time we started our research, an overall picture of developers’ work habits related to the creation and usage of sketches and diagrams was missing To fill this gap, we conducted an exploratory field study in different software companies, an online survey with software practitioners, and an observational study with software developers. We continue to maintain the dataset to support further research on the origin, evolution, and usage of content on Stack Overflow
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