Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

9-2015

Abstract

Software developers pursue a wide range of activities as part of their work, and making sense of what they did in a given time frame is far from trivial as evidenced by the large number of awareness and coordination tools that have been developed in recent years. To inform tool design for making sense of the information available about a developer’s activity, we conducted an empirical study with 156 GitHub users to investigate what information they would expect in a summary of development activity, how they would measure development activity, and what factors influence how such activity can be condensed into textual summaries or numbers. We found that unexpected events are as important as expected events in summaries of what a developer did, and that many developers do not believe in measuring development activity. Among the factors that influence summarization and measurement of development activity, we identified development experience and programming languages.

Keywords

Development activity, Empirical study, Summarization

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ESEC/FSE 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering, Bergamo, Italy, August 30 - September 4

First Page

625

Last Page

636

ISBN

9781450336758

Identifier

10.1145/2786805.2786827

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/2786805.2786827

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