Software Engineering

In modern data analytics, practices from software development are increasingly necessary to manage data,but they must be incorporated alongside other statistical and scientific skills. Therefore, we ask: how does a community recontextualize and reinterpret software development through the unique pressures of their work? To answer this, we explore the data-centric community around baseball...

During code review, developers critically examine each others’ code to improve its quality, share knowledge, and ensure conformance to coding standards. In the process, developers may have negative interpersonal interactions with their peers, which can lead to frustration and stress; these negative interactions may ultimately result in developers abandoning projects. In this mixed-methods study...

Statistical language modeling techniques have successfully been applied to large source code corpora, yielding a variety of new software development tools, such as tools for code suggestion, improving readability, and API migration. A major issue with these techniques is that code introduces new vocabulary at a far higher rate than natural language, as new identifier names proliferate. Both...

Designing usable APIs is critical to developers’ productivity and software quality, but is quite difficult. One of the challenges is that anticipating API usability barriers and real world usage is difficult, due to a lack of automated approaches to mine usability data at scale. In this paper, we focus on one particular grievance that developers repeatedly express in online discussions about...