"It would work for me too": How Online Communities Shape Software Developers' Trust in AI-Powered Code Generation Tools

While revolutionary AI-powered code generation tools have been rising rapidly, we know little about how and how to help software developers form appropriate trust in those AI tools. Through a two-phase formative study, we investigate how online communities shape developers' trust in AI tools and how we can leverage community features to facilitate appropriate user trust. Through interviewing 17 developers, we find that developers collectively make sense of AI tools using the experiences shared by community members and leverage community signals to evaluate AI suggestions. We then surface design opportunities and conduct 11 design probe sessions to explore the design space of using community features to support user trust in AI code generation systems. We synthesize our findings and extend an existing model of user trust in AI technologies with sociotechnical factors. We map out the design considerations for integrating user community into the AI code generation experience

More than Code: Contributions in Scrum Software Engineering Teams

Motivated and competent team members are a vital part of Agile Software development and make or break any project's success. Motivation is fostered by continuous progress and recognition of efforts. These concepts are founding pillars of the Scrum methodology, which focuses on self-organizing teams. The types of contributions Scrum development team members make to a project's progress are not only technical. However, a comprehensive model comprising the varied contributions in modern software engineering teams is not yet established. We propose a model that incorporates contributions of all Scrum roles, explicitly including those which are not directly related to project artifacts. It improves the visibility of performed tasks, acts as a starting point for team retrospection, and serves as a foundation for discussion in the research community.Comment: Published in IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ACM Press, 202

Including Everyone, Everywhere:Understanding Opportunities and Challenges of Geographic Gender-Inclusion in OSS

The gender gap is a significant concern facing the software industry as the development becomes more geographically distributed. Widely shared reports indicate that gender differences may be specific to each region. However, how complete can these reports be with little to no research reflective of the Open Source Software (OSS) process and communities software is now commonly developed in? Our study presents a multi-region geographical analysis of gender inclusion on GitHub. This mixed-methods approach includes quantitatively investigating differences in gender inclusion in projects across geographic regions and investigate these trends over time using data from contributions to 21,456 project repositories. We also qualitatively understand the unique experiences of developers contributing to these projects through a survey that is strategically targeted to developers in various regions worldwide. Our findings indicate that gender diversity is low across all parts of the world, with no substantial difference across regions. However, there has been statistically significant improvement in diversity worldwide since 2014, with certain regions such as Africa improving at faster pace. We also find that most motivations and barriers to contributions (e.g., lack of resources to contribute and poor working environment) were shared across regions, however, some insightful differences, such as how to make projects more inclusive, did arise. From these findings, we derive and present implications for tools that can foster inclusion in open source software communities and empower contributions from everyone, everywhere

Action-based recommendation in pull-request development

Pull requests (PRs) selection is a challenging task faced by integrators in pull-based development (PbD), with hundreds of PRs submitted on a daily basis to large open-source projects. Managing these PRs manually consumes integrators' time and resources and may lead to delays in the acceptance, response, or rejection of PRs that can propose bug fixes or feature enhancements. On the one hand, well-known platforms for performing PbD, like GitHub, do not provide built-in recommendation mechanisms for facilitating the management of PRs. On the other hand, prior research on PRs recommendation has focused on the likelihood of either a PR being accepted or receive a response by the integrator. In this paper, we consider both those likelihoods, this to help integrators in the PRs selection process by suggesting to them the appropriate actions to undertake on each specific PR. To this aim, we propose an approach, called CARTESIAN (aCceptance And Response classificaTion-based requESt IdentificAtioN) modeling the PRs recommendation according to PR actions. In particular, CARTESIAN is able to recommend three types of PR actions: accept, respond, and reject. We evaluated CARTESIAN on the PRs of 19 popular GitHub projects. The results of our study demonstrate that our approach can identify PR actions with an average precision and recall of about 86%. Moreover, our findings also highlight that CARTESIAN outperforms the results of two baseline approaches in the task of PRs selection

How remote work can foster a more inclusive environment for transgender developers

In this position paper, we claim that remote work offers a mechanism of control for identity disclosure and empowerment of software developers from marginalized communities. By talking to several transgender software developers we identified three themes that resonate across the trans experience and intersect with the advantages to working in software development remotely: identity disclosure, high-impact technical work and the autonomy to disengage and re-engage. Based on these themes we identify several open questions that the research community should address

How remote work can foster a more inclusive environment for transgender developers

\u3cp\u3eIn this position paper, we claim that remote work offers a mechanism of control for identity disclosure and empowerment of software developers from marginalized communities. By talking to several transgender software developers we identified three themes that resonate across the trans experience and intersect with the advantages to working in software development remotely: identity disclosure, high-impact technical work and the autonomy to disengage and re-engage. Based on these themes we identify several open questions that the research community should address.\u3c/p\u3