Understanding and Enhancing a Participatory Culture of Software Development

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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. **