November 4, 2015
How Social Media Shape a Participatory Culture in Software Engineering
Abstract:
Software developers rely on media to communicate, learn, collaborate and network with others. Over just the past few years, social media has dramatically changed the landscape of software engineering, challenging some old assumptions about how developers learn and work with one another. We see the rise of the social programmer who actively participates in online communities and openly contributes to the creation of a large body of crowdsourced socio-technical content, as well as the emergence of new tools and communication channels that developers use.
In this talk, I will present the past, present, and future roles of socially enabled tools in software engineering, reviewing research that examines the use of different media channels in software engineering from 1968 to the present day. I will also provide results from surveys we have conducted with thousands of developers that actively use social media to understand how they communicate and collaborate, and to gain insights into the challenges they face. We found that while this particular population values social media, traditional channels, such as face-to-face communication, are still considered crucial. I will further synthesize findings from our historical review and survey to propose a roadmap for future research on this topic.
Bio:
Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey is a professor of computer science at the University of Victoria and a Canada Research Chair in Human Computer Interaction for Software Engineering. She is a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto and one of the principal investigators for the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, US. Her research goal is to understand how technology can help people explore, understand and share complex information and knowledge. She applies and evaluates techniques from knowledge engineering, social software and visual interface design to applications such as collaborative software development, program comprehension, biomedical ontology development, and learning in web-based environments.