Collaborative Software Development Environment Research Articles

Generative Ai in Software Development : an Overview and Evaluation of Modern Coding Tools

Generative AI has significantly transformed software development by leveraging advanced machine learning models to automate coding tasks, generate code, and enhance productivity. This paper provides an overview and evaluation of modern AI-powered coding tools, including GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, DeepCode, Amazon CodeGuru, TabNine, Kite, and IntelliCode, which use large language models (LLMs) to offer real-time code suggestions, automated error detection, and intelligent code completions. Despite their benefits, these tools face challenges related to accuracy, contextual understanding, security, privacy, and ethical considerations, necessitating thorough review and testing of AI-generated code by developers. The integration of AI in coding also raises concerns about proprietary information protection and ethical implications such as job displacement. This paper explores the capabilities, applications, and limitations of current generative AI tools, highlighting their impact on software development and discussing future directions. Emphasis is placed on the need for improved model training, enhanced contextual understanding, secure AI training methods, and ethical AI usage. By addressing these challenges, the industry can maximize the potential of generative AI, creating more accurate, reliable, and ethically sound tools that support a collaborative and innovative software development environment.

Prioritization Based Taxonomy of DevOps Challenges Using Fuzzy AHP Analysis

The DevOps (development and operations) is a collaborative software development environment which offers the continues development and deployment of quality software project within short time. The DevOps practices are not yet mature enough, and the software organizations hesitate to adopt it. This study aims: 1) to explore the DevOps challenges by conducting systematic literature review (SLR) and to get the insight of industry experts via questionnaire survey study and 2) to prioritize the investigated challenges using fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP). The study findings provide the set of critical challenges faced by the software organizations while adopting DevOps and a prioritization-based taxonomy of the DevOps challenges. The application of FAHP is novel in this research area as it assists in addressing the vagueness of practitioners concerning the influencing factors of DevOps. We believe that the finding of this study will serve as a body of knowledge for real world practitioners and researchers to revise and develop the new strategies for the successful implementation of DevOps practices in the software industry.

Data sets describing the circle of life in Ruby hosting, 2003–2016

Studying software repositories and hosting services can provide valuable insights into the behaviors of large groups of software developers and their projects. Traditionally, most analysis of metadata collected from software project hosting services has been conducted by specifying some short window of time, typically just a few years. To date, few - if any - studies have been built from data comprising the entirety of a hosting facility’s lifespan: from its birth to its death, and rebirth in another form. Thus, the first contribution of this paper is to present two data sets that support the historical analysis of over ten years of collected metadata from the now-defunct RubyForge project hosting site, as well as the follow-on successor to RubyForge, the RubyGems package (“gem”) hosting facility. The data sets and samples of usage demonstrated in this paper include: analyses of overall forge growth over time, presentation of data and analyses of project-level characteristics on both forges and their changes over time (for example in licenses, languages, and so on), and demonstration of how to use developer-level metadata (for example counts of new developers and calculation of developer-project density) to assess changes in person-level activity on both sites over time. Finally, because RubyForge was phased out and the gem-hosting portion of it was replaced by RubyGems, all the gems within RubyForge projects were transferred by project owners and by the site owners themselves into the RubyGems hosting facility. Thus, the data sets in this paper represent a unique opportunity to study projects as they moved from one ecosystem to another, and as such we show several methods for locating related projects between the two forges, and for building a cross-forge, longitudinal project history using information from both forges. These data sets and sample analyses in this paper will be relevant to researchers studying long-term software evolution, and distributed, hosted, or collaborative software development environments.

The appropriation of GitHub for curation

GitHub is a widely used online collaborative software development environment. In this paper, we describe curation projects as a new category of GitHub project that collects, evaluates, and preserves resources for software developers. We investigate: (1) what motivates software developers to curate resources; (2) why curation has occurred on GitHub; (3) how curated resources are used by software developers; and (4) how the GitHub platform could better support these practices. We conduct in-depth interviews with 16 software developers, each of whom hosts curation projects on GitHub. Our results suggest that the motivators that inspire software developers to curate resources on GitHub are similar to those that motivate them to participate in the development of open source projects. Convenient tools (e.g., Markdown syntax and Git version control system) and the opportunity to address professional needs of a large number of peers attract developers to engage in curation projects on GitHub. Benefits of curating on GitHub include learning opportunities, support for development work, and professional interaction. However, curation is limited by GitHub’s document structure, format, and a lack of key features, such as search. In light of this, we propose design possibilities to encourage and improve appropriations of GitHub for curation.

An Inconsistency Management Support System for Collaborative Software Development

In collaborative software developments, many change processes implementing change requests are executed concurrently by different workers. The fact that the workers do not have sufficient information about the others' work and complicated dependencies among artifacts can lead to unexpected inconsistencies among the artifacts impacted by the changes. Most previous studies concentrated only on concurrent changes and considered them separately. However, even when the changes are not concurrent, inconsistencies may still happen if a worker does not recognize the impact of the changes made by other workers on his changes or the impact of his changes on other workers' changes. In addition, the changes in a change process are related to each other through their common target of realizing the change request and the dependencies among the changed artifacts. Therefore, to handle inconsistencies more effectively, we concentrate on both concurrent and non-concurrent changes, and the context of a change, i.e. the change process containing the change, rather than the ongoing changes only. In this paper, we present an inconsistency awareness mechanism and a Change Support Workflow Management System (CSWMS) that realizes this mechanism. By monitoring the progress of the change processes and the ongoing changes in the client workspaces, CSWMS can notify the workers of a (potential) inconsistency in advance along with the context of the inconsistency, that is, the changes causing the inconsistency and the change processes containing these changes. Based on the information provided by CSWMS, the workers can detect and resolve inconsistencies more easily and quickly. Therefore, our research can contribute to building a safer and more efficient collaborative software development environment.

Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative Software Development Environments

Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers collaborating to generate good reliable code. Among the software code there exist technical dependencies that arise from software components using services from other components. The different ways of assigning the design, development, and testing of these software modules to people can cause various coordination problems among them. We claim that the collaboration of the developers, designers and testers must be related to and governed by the technical task structure. These collaboration practices are handled in what we call Socio-Technical Patterns. The TESNA project (Technical Social Network Analysis) we report on in this paper addresses this issue. We propose a method and a tool that a project manager can use in order to detect the socio-technical coordination problems. We test the method and tool in a case study of a small and innovative software product company.

Ariadne: An Eclipse-based system for tracking originality of source code

In this paper we introduce Ariadne, an Eclipse-based system for tracking the originality of source code in collaborative software development environments in which software reuse is a common practice. We describe its architecture within the Eclipse framework, the originality metadata of which it keeps track, and the history clue—the data structure used to implement the tracking mechanism. We also discuss the implementation of the Ariadne client, the main component of the system, and show how digital signatures are used to validate the integrity of the metadata-handling process. We demonstrate the functions of Ariadne in two typical scenarios: tracking of software bugs and generating originality claims for Certificate of Originality reports. Although our Eclipse-based prototype is designed to handle Java source code, our approach can be extended to other kinds of artifacts.

An authorization mechanism for unix-based cooperative environments

The extension to the UNIX protection mechanisms proposed in this paper aims at supporting controlled resource sharing and more flexible and fine-grained discretionary protection in UNIX-based cooperative work environments, such as collaborative software development environments (SDEs). In these environments, the project members need to share programs, data and tools on a temporary basis and according to their roles in the project. Run-time updatable decentralized authorization allows the group to implement separate work areas administered by different project responsibles. The proposed system is based on tools for specifying the cooperative SDE protection policies at the level of project members. Decentralized authorization is achieved through the authorizer role. System tools, integrated in the UNIX kernel, implement the run-time access checking. The protection system architecture and a prototype, based on a UNIX-like kernel restructuring approach, are described.