User satisfaction has always been important in the success of software, regardless of whether it is closed and proprietary or open source software (OSS). OSS users are geographically distributed and include technical as well as novice users. However, it is generally believed that if OSS was more usable, its popularity would increase tremendously. Hence, users and their requirements need to be addressed in the priorities of an OSS environment. Online public forums are a major medium of communication for the OSS community. The research model of this work studies the relationship between user requirements in open source software and online public forums. To conduct this research, we used a dataset consisting of 100 open source software projects in different categories. The results show that online forums play a significant role in identifying user requirements and addressing their requests in open source software.
Question and answer (Q&A) forums contain valuable information regarding software reuse, but they can be challenging to analyse due to their unstructured free text. Here we introduce a new approach (LANLAN), using word embeddings and machine learning, to harness information available in StackOverflow. Specifically, we consider two different kinds of user communication describing difficulties encountered in software reuse: 'problem reports' point to potential defects, while 'support requests' ask for clarification on software usage. Word embeddings were trained on 1.6 billion tokens from StackOv…
With the advance in quantum computing, quantum software becomes critical for exploring the full potential of quantum computing systems. Recently, quantum software engineering (QSE) becomes an emerging area attracting more and more attention. However, it is not clear what are the challenges and opportunities of quantum computing facing the software engineering community. This work aims to understand the QSE-related challenges perceived by developers. We perform an empirical study on Stack Exchange forums where developers post-QSE-related questions & answers and Github issue reports where develo…
User forums of Open Source Software (OSS) enable end-users to collaboratively discuss problems concerning the OSS applications. Despite decades of research on OSS, we know very little about how end-users engage with OSS communities on these forums, in particular, the challenges that hinder their continuous and meaningful participation in the OSS community. Many previous works are developer-centric and overlook the importance of end-user forums. As a result, end-users' expectations are seldom reflected in OSS development. To better understand user behaviors in OSS user forums, we carried out an…
Research software is essential to modern research, but it requires ongoing human effort to sustain: to continually adapt to changes in dependencies, to fix bugs, and to add new features. Software sustainability institutes, amongst others, develop, maintain, and disseminate best practices for research software sustainability, and build community around them. These practices can both reduce the amount of effort that is needed and create an environment where the effort is appreciated and rewarded. The UK SSI is such an institute, and the US URSSI and the Australian AuSSI are planning to become in…
Context: Successfully addressing stakeholder concerns that are related to software system development and operation is crucial to achieving development goals. The importance of using a systematic approach to addressing these concerns throughout the software development life cycle is growing as more and more systems are employed to handle critical tasks. Objective: The goal of this study is to provide an overview of addressing concerns across the software development life cycle. Method: A systematic mapping study was conducted using a pre-defined protocol. Four digital databases were searched f…
Software teams are increasingly adopting different tools and communication channels to aid the software collaborative development model and coordinate tasks. Among such resources, Programming Community-based Question Answering (PCQA) forums have become widely used by developers. Such environments enable developers to get and share technical information. Interested in supporting the development and management of Open Source Software (OSS) projects, GitHub announced GitHub Discussions - a native forum to facilitate collaborative discussions between users and members of communities hosted on the …
Alerted by our previous research as well as media reports and discussions in online forums about ageism in the software industry, we set out to study the public discourse around age and software development. With a focus on the USA, we analyzed popular online articles and related discussions on Hacker News through the lens of (perceived) employability issues and potential mitigation strategies. Besides rather controversial strategies such as disguising age-related aspects in résumés or undergoing plastic surgeries to appear young, we highlight the importance of keeping up-to-date, specializing…
Categorization via gender is omnipresent throughout society, and thus also computing; gender identity is often requested of users before they use software or web services. Despite this fact, no research has explored how software developers approach requesting gender disclosure from users. To understand how developers think about gender in software, we present an interview study with 15 software developers recruited from the freelancing platform Upwork as well as Twitter. We also collected and categorized 917 threads that contained keywords relevant to gender from programming-related sub-forums…
Beyond the 'Diff': Addressing Agentic Entropy in Agentic Software Development
Dipartimento Tecnologie Innovative, SUPSI（技术创新部，SUPSI）；Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), SUPSI（达勒莫利人工智能研究所（IDSIA），SUPSI）；Management in Networked and Digital Societies (MINDS) Department, Kozminski University（网络化与数字化社会管理（MINDS）系，科津斯基大学）；Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Zurich（生物医学伦理与医学史研究所，苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
