1 research outputs found
Image-based Communication on Social Coding Platforms
Visual content in the form of images and videos has taken over
general-purpose social networks in a variety of ways, streamlining and
enriching online communications. We are interested to understand if and to what
extent the use of images is popular and helpful in social coding platforms. We
mined nine years of data from two popular software developers' platforms: the
Mozilla issue tracking system, i.e., Bugzilla, and the most well-known platform
for developers' Q/A, i.e., Stack Overflow. We further triangulated and extended
our mining results by performing a survey with 168 software developers. We
observed that, between 2013 and 2022, the number of posts containing image data
on Bugzilla and Stack Overflow doubled. Furthermore, we found that sharing
images makes other developers engage more and faster with the content. In the
majority of cases in which an image is included in a developer's post, the
information in that image is complementary to the text provided. Finally, our
results showed that when an image is shared, understanding the content without
the information in the image is unlikely for 86.9\% of the cases. Based on
these observations, we discuss the importance of considering visual content
when analyzing developers and designing automation tools