SHF: Small: Collaborative Research: Automatically Enhancing Quality of Social Communication Channels to Support Software Developers and Improve Tool Reliability

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Social communication channels (e.g., Stack Overflow, Slack, and GitHub) play an increasingly important role in software developer productivity, as developers use these channels to collaborate and coordinate activities. Researchers have shown additional value in mining information from these sources to develop and improve recommendation systems, software integrated development environments, and other tools. Users of these systems complain about the varying and often poor quality of the information shared on these channels despite the intrinsic mechanisms for maintaining quality (e.g., voting, accepted answers). This project aims to address the need for automation in curating for increased quality of the information shared in developer communication channels. The envisioned system uses multiple software developers' social communication channels as parallel sources of evidence to establish quality of information in each channel.This project will contribute to the state of the art by tackling three major challenges to bring automated curation of developer communication into practical use. The first aim is to develop analyses for automatically determining and improving the quality of developers' interactive communications on social media sites with regard to quality concerns including poor software properties, obsolescence, contradictions, unreliable sources, and duplication. The second aim is to explore different feedback mechanisms to indicate quality findings back to the communities. Third, the project will develop techniques to customize quality measurement and feedback to a particular developer's context. The resulting tools, data sets, and experimental infrastructure developed as part of the project will be released, enabling other researchers and practitioners to build on the project's results and ultimately advance the quality of the modern software development ecosystem.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.