Exploring, exposing, and exploiting emails to include human factors in software engineering

TitleExploring, exposing, and exploiting emails to include human factors in software engineering
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2011
AuthorsBacchelli, A
Secondary TitleCompanion to the Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
Pagination1074–1077
PublisherACM
Place PublishedNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-0445-0
Keywordsemail communication, toolset, unstructured data
Abstract

Researchers mine software repositories to support software maintenance and evolution. The analysis of the structured data, mainly source code and changes, has several benefits and offers precise results. This data, however, leaves communication in the background, and does not permit a deep investigation of the human factor, which is crucial in software engineering.

Software repositories also archive documents, such as emails or comments, that are used to exchange knowledge among people - we call it "people-centric information." By covering this data, we include the human factor in our analysis, yet its unstructured nature makes it currently sub-exploited.

Our work, by focusing on email communication and by implementing the necessary tools, investigates methods for exploring, exposing, and exploiting unstructured data. We believe it is possible to close the gap between development and communication, extract opinions, habits, and views of developers, and link implementation to its rationale; we see in a future where software analysis and development is routinely augmented with people-centric information.

Notes

This paper is a summary of work in the field, for the doctoral consortium.

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1985793.1985999
DOI10.1145/1985793.1985999
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