A First Look at Developers' Live Chat on Gitter

07/13/2021
by   Lin Shi, et al.
0

Modern communication platforms such as Gitter and Slack play an increasingly critical role in supporting software teamwork, especially in open source development.Conversations on such platforms often contain intensive, valuable information that may be used for better understanding OSS developer communication and collaboration. However, little work has been done in this regard. To bridge the gap, this paper reports a first comprehensive empirical study on developers' live chat, investigating when they interact, what community structures look like, which topics are discussed, and how they interact. We manually analyze 749 dialogs in the first phase, followed by an automated analysis of over 173K dialogs in the second phase. We find that developers tend to converse more often on weekdays, especially on Wednesdays and Thursdays (UTC), that there are three common community structures observed, that developers tend to discuss topics such as API usages and errors, and that six dialog interaction patterns are identified in the live chat communities. Based on the findings, we provide recommendations for individual developers and OSS communities, highlight desired features for platform vendors, and shed light on future research directions. We believe that the findings and insights will enable a better understanding of developers' live chat, pave the way for other researchers, as well as a better utilization and mining of knowledge embedded in the massive chat history.

READ FULL TEXT

page 7

page 8

research
07/12/2019

An Exploratory Study of Live-Streamed Programming

In live-streamed programming, developers broadcast their development wor...
research
04/08/2021

Do Communities in Developer Interaction Networks align with Subsystem Developer Teams? An Empirical Study of Open Source Systems

Studies over the past decade demonstrated that developers contributing t...
research
09/15/2021

ISPY: Automatic Issue-Solution Pair Extraction from Community Live Chats

Collaborative live chats are gaining popularity as a development communi...
research
08/19/2023

Characterizing Usability Issue Discussions in OSS Projects

Usability is a crucial factor but one of the most neglected concerns in ...
research
09/02/2022

Developer Discussion Topics on the Adoption and Barriers of Low Code Software Development Platforms

Low-code software development (LCSD) is an emerging approach to democrat...
research
03/12/2021

Building the perfect game – an empirical study of game modifications

Game developers cannot always meet the growing and changing needs of the...
research
01/28/2022

Identifying Emergent Leadership in OSS Projects Based on Communication Styles

In open source software (OSS) communities, existing leadership indicator...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset