Title
How do developers blog?: an exploratory study
Abstract
We report on an exploratory study, which aims at understanding how software developers use social media compared to conventional development infrastructures. We analyzed the blogging and the committing behavior of 1,100 developers in four large open source communities. We observed that these communities intensively use blogs with one new entry about every 8 hours. A blog entry includes 14 times more words than a commit message. When analyzing the content of the blogs, we found that most popular topics represent high-level concepts such as functional requirements and domain concepts. Source code related topics are covered in less than 15% of the posts. Our results also show that developers are more likely to blog after corrective engineering and management activities than after forward engineering and re-engineering activities. Our findings call for a hypothesis-driven research to further understand the role of social media in software engineering and integrate it into development processes and tools.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/1985441.1985461
MSR
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
conventional development infrastructure,social media,corrective engineering,development process,developers blog,software engineering,exploratory study,large open source community,software developer,new entry,blog entry,forward engineering,functional requirement,software development,source code,data mining
Conference
27
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.62
13
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dennis Pagano126712.94
Walid Maalej2102175.14