Understanding and Enhancing a Participatory Culture of Software Development

Facebook和Twitter等社交媒体的采用率在技术采用率史上是前所未有的。这些工具对许多领域产生了深远的破坏性影响。同样，我们也看到了社交媒体对软件开发的变革性影响。像GitHub这样的社交编码网站，以及Stack Overflow这样的社区问答论坛，已经成为许多软件工程师事实上的工具集的一部分。这些社交工具促进了参与式开发文化的出现，在这种文化中，开发者渴望与他人建立联系、相互学习并共同创造。这种参与式开发文化加速了重要开源软件和技术资源的创建和共享。******虽然我们可以看到开发人员在社交环境中参与和学习的许多引人注目的好处，但仍然存在关于如何在封闭的开发环境中使用这些工具的问题。通过我们早期的研究，我们也意识到一些不可忽视的挑战，包括参与的障碍，对开发人员工作流程的破坏以及专有的安全和隐私问题。我们目前对好处和挑战的理解是有限的，因为大多数研究都是在开源环境下进行的，并且几乎没有开始考虑社交媒体可能对软件质量以及软件社区或软件项目的健康和可持续性产生的影响。因此，我的研究项目旨在更深入地了解参与式发展文化在不同发展背景下可能带来的好处和挑战。我和我的学生将研究社交媒体目前如何在软件工程中使用，以及设计我们将在工业环境中部署和评估的新工具和工作实践。我们的发现将用于为改进工具和工作实践提供建议。******然而，我们研究的影响超出了软件开发。软件开发人员有时被称为未来的原型知识工作者。其他领域（包括卫生和教育）的知识工作者后来采用了开发人员的创新，如Web、电子邮件和维基。因此，我们预计我们的发现将在最佳实践和改进的工具设计方面对许多知识工作领域产生影响。**

The adoption rate of social media such as Facebook and Twitter has been unprecedented in the history of technology adoption. These tools have had a profound and disruptive impact on many domains. Likewise, we see a transformative impact from the use of social media on software development. Social coding sites such as GitHub, and community authored question and answer forums such as Stack Overflow, have become part of the de facto toolset for many software engineers. These social tools facilitate the emergence of a participatory development culture, where developers are keen to connect with, learn from, and co-create with others. This participatory development culture has accelerated the creation and sharing of important open source software and technical resources. ******Although we can see many compelling benefits when developers participate and learn in a social environment, there remain questions about how these tools can be used in closed development settings. Through our earlier research, we have also become aware of a number of challenges that cannot be ignored, including barriers to participation, disruptions to developer workflows and proprietary security and privacy concerns. Our current understanding of the benefits and challenges are limited as most studies have been conducted in open source contexts and have barely begun to consider the impact that social media may have on software quality and on the health and sustainability of the software community or software project over time. Therefore, my research program aims to develop a more in depth understanding of the benefits and challenges that a participatory development culture may introduce across diverse development contexts. My students and I will conduct studies of how social media is currently used in software engineering, as well as design new tools and work practices that we will deploy and evaluate in industrial settings. Our findings will be used to provide recommendations for improved tools and work practices. ******However, the impact of our research goes beyond software development. Software developers are sometimes referred to as the prototype knowledge workers of tomorrow. Knowledge workers in other domains, including health and education, later adopt developer innovations, such as the Web, email and wikis. Thus, we anticipate our findings will have implications across many areas of knowledge work in terms of best practices and improved tool designs. **