Can Development Work Describe Itself?

Jahr:
2010

Autoren/Hrsg:
Walid Maalej, Hans-Jörg Happel

Publikationstyp:
Kongressbeitrag/Proceeding

Quelle:
In: Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2010) (to appear)

Abstract:
Work descriptions are informal notes taken by developers to summarize work achieved in a particular session. Existing studies indicate that maintaining them is a distracting task, which costs a developer more than 30 min. a day. The goal of this research is to analyze the purposes of work descriptions, and ?nd out if automated tools can assist developers in ef?ciently creating them. For this, we mine a large dataset of heterogeneous work descriptions from open source and commercial projects. We analyze the semantics of these documents and identify common information entities and granularity levels. Information on performed actions, concerned artifacts, references and new work, shows the work management purpose of work descriptions. Information on problems, rationale and experience shows their knowledge sharing purpose. We discuss how work description information, in particular information used for work management, can be generated by observing developers’ interactions. Our ?ndings have many implications for next generation software engineering tools.

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