Attribution Required: Stack Overflow Code Snippets in GitHub Projects

Stack Overflow (SO) is the largest Q&A website for developers, providing a huge amount of copyable code snippets. Using these snippets raises various maintenance and legal issues. The SO license requires attribution, i.e., referencing the original question or answer, and requires derived work to adopt a compatible license. While there is a heated debate on SO's license model for code snippets and the required attribution, little is known about the extent to which snippets are copied from SO without proper attribution. In this paper, we present the research design and summarized results of an empirical study analyzing attributed and unattributed usages of SO code snippets in GitHub projects. On average, 3.22% of all analyzed repositories and 7.33% of the popular ones contained a reference to SO. Further, we found that developers rather refer to the whole thread on SO than to a specific answer. For Java, at least two thirds of the copied snippets were not attributed.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-C 2017), IEEE, 2017, pp. 161-16

Is 40 the new 60? How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers

Alerted by our previous research as well as media reports and discussions in online forums about ageism in the software industry, we set out to study the public discourse around age and software development. With a focus on the USA, we analyzed popular online articles and related discussions on Hacker News through the lens of (perceived) employability issues and potential mitigation strategies. Besides rather controversial strategies such as disguising age-related aspects in r\'esum\'es or undergoing plastic surgeries to appear young, we highlight the importance of keeping up-to-date, specializing in certain tasks or technologies, and present role transitions as a way forward for veteran developers. With this article, we want to build awareness among decision makers in software projects to help them anticipate and mitigate challenges that their older employees may face.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, currently under revie