Paper Info
Title
Facilitating enterprise software developer communication with CARES
Abstract
Enterprise software developers must regularly communicate with one another to obtain information and coordinate changes to legacy code, but find it cumbersome and complicated to determine the most relevant and expedient person to contact. This becomes especially difficult when the relevant person has transferred teams or changed their personal contact information since contributing to the project. We conducted a year-long series of surveys and interviews to help us learn how, why, and how often software developers discover and communicate with one another. In response to what we saw, we designed, deployed, and evaluated a domain-specific, IDE-embedded, photo-oriented, communication tool. We overcame a significant challenge found in long-lived projects: uniquely identifying individuals years after their contributions to the project. After deploying our tool, iteratively refining it, and deploying it again on a company-wide scale, most users reported that it simplified the process of finding and reaching out to other developers and offered them a sense of community with their colleagues, even if those colleagues did not currently work on their team. The lessons learned from our study and tool development should apply to other large, multi-team, legacy software projects.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405317
ICSM
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
legacy software project,tool development,facilitating enterprise software developer,enterprise software developer,long-lived project,legacy code,relevant person,expedient person,software developer,communication tool,personal contact information,software engineering,software maintenance,interviews,communication,visualization
Conference
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.53
16
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anja Guzzi1885.23
Krishna Nareddy270.53
Jessica K. Miller31108.59
Andrew Begel4115470.70