Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

5-2013

Abstract

Why do software developers place so much effort into writing public blog posts about their knowledge, experiences, and opinions on software development? What are the benefits, problems, and tools needed-what can the research community do to help? In this paper, we describe a research agenda aimed at understanding the motivations and issues of software development blogging. We interviewed developers as well as mined and analyzed their blog posts. For this initial study, we selected developers from various backgrounds: IDE plugin development, mobile development, and web development. We found that developers used blogging for a variety of functions such as documentation, technology discussion, and announcing progress. They were motivated by a variety of reasons such as personal branding, knowledge retention, and feedback. Among the challenges for blog authors identified in our initial study, we found primitive tool support, difficulty recreating and recalling recent development experiences, and management of blog comments. Finally, many developers expressed that the motivations and benefits they received for blogging in public did not directly translate to corporate settings.

Keywords

Blogs, Communities, Software, Documentation, Employment, Media, Educational institutions

Discipline

Educational Methods | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 2013 21st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), San Francisco, California, May 20-21

First Page

211

Last Page

214

ISBN

9781467330923

Identifier

10.1109/ICPC.2013.6613850

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2013.6613850

Download

Share

COinS