Social Media Collaboration in Software Projects

Social media has had a big impact on the way that software projects are managed and the way that stakeholders interact with each other: indeed, the nature of soft-ware projects has evolved substantially in keeping with the evolution of technology. A direct consequence of the ubiquity of the internet is the increasing trend towards cooperation outside the boundaries of an office. The interactions involved in soft-ware projects have changed accordingly and can be broadly divided into two types (1) interactions among stakeholders who are in a single location, (for example people sharing the same office space) and (2) interactions among stakeholders who are in distributed locations (for example software projects which are partly implemented offshore). Social media has been and remains a significant facilitator to these kinds of interactions. This chapter looks at the implications of the use of social media in 21st Century software projects

Web 2.0 Technologies in the Software Development Process.

Software engineers must communicate with many different people, likely in different locations, in order to create a successful piece of software. Social media can be used to communicate quickly and efficiently to minimize miscommunications and facilitate collaboration in the software development process. Research in this area has been sparse but significant because initial findings show that social media is being used in innovative ways to improve software development. Surveys of what social media some companies are currently using along with information about new social media systems indicate possible uses for these technologies on future software development projects such as documentation maintenance, employee training, and predicting and thus preventing build failures

A Research Framework for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Implementations of Social Media in Higher Education

Following the lead of today’s hi-tech businesses and industries, many college campuses have begun using Web.2.0 social media technologies like Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and YouTube to facilitate information sharing and collaboration among administrators, faculty, and students. An examination of research on campus social media initiatives revealed that universities are beginning to provide support and infrastructure to support social media initiatives, and that social media tools are being used as part of course content and delivery, where students can use them for collaboration and group decision making on real-world projects. However, much of the research to date was found to be anecdotal, descriptive, and lacking objective evaluation. The paper argues that more rigorous, analytical research is needed to compare and contrast specific features of social media software, the way it is used and implemented, and the outcomes achieved, by students and/or by other stakeholders. To guide future research, the author proposes a research framework that identifies various factors that impact implementations of social media in higher education, as well as relevant outcome variables that should be measured

Collaboration Circles: empowering job seekers to find work using ad-hoc collaboration networks

Recent trends combine smart phones with social networking platforms to bring new opportunities that can enable people to collaborate anywhere and at any time. For example, organisations can be given the opportunity to recruit part-time job seekers such as software developers using social media tools. Previously, collaboration was static in nature, but today loosely enabled collaboration needs to support flexible schedules, ad hoc processes and members that may not be known in advance. Furthermore, current crowdsourcing platforms that enable software developers to contribute their skills to projects do not meet the social needs of participants as they collaborate. This paper presents a cost-effective approach to collaboration that aims to assist users to find suitable collaborators to team up with. The proposed Collaboration Circles application is able to find the best time to collaborate using Google+, Google calendar and a weighted assignment algorithm. The Collaboration Circles application includes features such as the administration of collaborative task activities and communication channels. The Collaboration Circles application is implemented as an Android social network application supported by Google tools. The application is experimentally evaluated to demonstrate that the Collaboration Circles application successfully supports collaboration in the virtual world

Introduction of Enterprise Collaboration Systems: In-depth Studies Show That Laissez-faire Does Not Work

Inspired by the perceived success of the Social Media, an increasing number of companies have started to introduce social-media-like software systems (Enterprise Collaboration Systems). In order to study the issues and challenges that such introduction projects bring about, we selected a sample of companies and conducted interviews with managers, IT experts and users. The analysis of the responses shows that the experiences among the companies and among people in the same roles in these companies are very similar. All case companies used an approach that could be described as experiential, or laissez-faire, meaning that they installed the system and invited their staff to use it – without clear instructions or management controls. This led to a certain degree of insecurity and the adoption rate was lower than expected. We argue that the laissez-faire approach did not stimulate (the full potential of) project success. The findings also show that the introduction of social software brings about cultural rather than technical challenges. These cultural challenges can be anticipated and should be managed ex ante, not ad hoc

HydroShare – A Case Study of the Application of Modern Software Engineering to a Large Distributed Federally-Funded Scientific Software Development Project

HydroShare is an online collaborative system under development to support the open sharing of hydrologic data, analytical tools, and computer models. With HydroShare, scientists can easily discover, access, and analyze hydrologic data and thereby enhance the production and reproducibility of hydrologic scientific results. HydroShare also takes advantage of emerging social media functionality to enable users to enhance information about and collaboration around hydrologic data and models. HydroShare is being developed by an interdisciplinary collaborative team of domain scientists, university software developers, and professional software engineers from ten institutions located across the United States. While the combination of non–co-located, diverse stakeholders presents communication and management challenges, the interdisciplinary nature of the team is integral to the project’s goal of improving scientific software development and capabilities in academia. This chapter describes the challenges faced and lessons learned with the development of HydroShare, as well as the approach to software development that the HydroShare team adopted on the basis of the lessons learned. The chapter closes with recommendations for the application of modern software engineering techniques to large, collaborative, scientific software development projects, similar to the National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded HydroShare, in order to promote the successful application of the approach described herein by other teams for other projects

Predicting Software Revision Outcomes on Github Using Structural Holes Theory

Many software repositories are hosted publicly online via social platforms. Online users contribute to the software projects not only by providing feedback and suggestions, but also by submitting revisions to improve the software quality. This study takes a close look at revisions and examines the impact of social media networks on the revision outcome. A novel approach with a mix of different research methods (e.g., ego-centric social network analysis, structural holes theory and survival analysis) is used to build a comprehensible model to predict the revision outcome. The predictive performance is validated using real life datasets obtained from GitHub, the social coding website, which contains 32,962 pull requests to submit revisions, 20,399 distinctive software project repositories, and a social network of 234,322 users. Good predictive performance has been achieved with an average AUC of 0.84. The results suggest that a repository host's position in the ego network plays an important role in determining the duration before a revision is accepted. Specifically, hosts that are positioned in between densely connected social groups are likely to respond more quickly to accept the revisions. The study demonstrates that online social networks are vital to software development and advances the understanding of collaboration in software development research. The proposed method can be applied to support decision making in software development to forecast revision duration. The result also has several implications for managing project collaboration using social media

Reciprocal Effect of Team Commitment and Media Richness in eCollaboration: A Conceptual Model

One of the major areas of E-Business applications is the sourcing of expert human resources globally with the help of virtual teams operating in various parts of the world. Major corporations are increasingly using e-Collaboration technologies to make the functioning of these teams economical and effective. The tasks performed by these teams can vary from software design and development to providing back office services like call center support, technical support, transcription services etc. Additionally, after 9/11 corporations have embarked on major initiatives to implement e-Collaboration technologies at the global level to help reduce travel. Extensive work has been done to study the decision-making performance of face-to-face and virtual teams. However, previous studies have found conflicting results regarding the impact of media richness on decision-making performances of teams. This paper posits the significant role of media type on the communication richness when team members have low commitment to the collaborative team projects. A conceptual model that depicts the influence of media type on satisfaction, team conflict, social influence, and supportiveness that influences the team commitment has been developed. The influence of team commitment on communication richness is also examined. A controlled lab experiment is designed to test the research model