The success of Stack Overflow and other community-based question-and-answer (Q&A) sites depends mainly on the will of their members to answer others’ questions. In fact, when formulating requests on ...Q&A sites, we are not simply seeking for information. Instead, we are also asking for other people's help and feedback. Understanding the dynamics of the participation in Q&A communities is essential to improve the value of crowdsourced knowledge.
In this paper, we investigate how information seekers can increase the chance of eliciting a successful answer to their questions on Stack Overflow by focusing on the following actionable factors: affect, presentation quality, and time.
We develop a conceptual framework of factors potentially influencing the success of questions in Stack Overflow. We quantitatively analyze a set of over 87 K questions from the official Stack Overflow dump to assess the impact of actionable factors on the success of technical requests. The information seeker reputation is included as a control factor. Furthermore, to understand the role played by affective states in the success of questions, we qualitatively analyze questions containing positive and negative emotions. Finally, a survey is conducted to understand how Stack Overflow users perceive the guideline suggestions for writing questions.
We found that regardless of user reputation, successful questions are short, contain code snippets, and do not abuse with uppercase characters. As regards affect, successful questions adopt a neutral emotional style.
We provide evidence-based guidelines for writing effective questions on Stack Overflow that software engineers can follow to increase the chance of getting technical help. As for the role of affect, we empirically confirmed community guidelines that suggest avoiding rudeness in question writing.
•We examine the uses and value of Enterprise social networking (ESN).•We employ a mixed methods approach.•Obtaining ideas through participating work discussions is the chief source of value.•ESN ...facilitates interactions and offers a space for knowledge creation.
Employees’ sustained knowledge contributions and their engagement in the platform is needed to materialize the organizational benefits from enterprise social networking (ESN). This paper adopts a knowledge management perspective on ESN. Through a mixed methods approach we examine how employees use ESN and the value of these uses. With a qualitative content analysis we identify five uses of ESN, problem solving, ideas and work discussion, events and updates, task management, and informal talk. With a survey we further show how these uses drive value of ESN. The results demonstrate that generating and obtaining new ideas for work by participating in discussions and finding solutions for work-related problems are the key sources of value. The results further show that the socially and work-oriented ESN uses are closely intertwined. Hence, the informal discussions in ESN are a lubricant for more utilitarian uses that should not be crowded out from the platform. Finally, we theorize that a specific advantage of ESN over information repositories and discussion forums is how ESN enables users to meet their social and work-related goals simultaneously. Our study offers a granular view of ESN use and guidance for developing organizational ESN policies.
Sentiment Polarity Detection for Software Development Calefato, Fabio; Lanubile, Filippo; Maiorano, Federico ...
Empirical software engineering : an international journal,
06/2018, Letnik:
23, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The role of sentiment analysis is increasingly emerging to study software developers’ emotions by mining crowd-generated content within social software engineering tools. However, off-the-shelf ...sentiment analysis tools have been trained on non-technical domains and general-purpose social media, thus resulting in misclassifications of technical jargon and problem reports. Here, we present Senti4SD, a classifier specifically trained to support sentiment analysis in developers’ communication channels. Senti4SD is trained and validated using a gold standard of Stack Overflow questions, answers, and comments manually annotated for sentiment polarity. It exploits a suite of both lexicon- and keyword-based features, as well as semantic features based on word embedding. With respect to a mainstream off-the-shelf tool, which we use as a baseline, Senti4SD reduces the misclassifications of neutral and positive posts as emotionally negative. To encourage replications, we release a lab package including the classifier, the word embedding space, and the gold standard with annotation guidelines.
In this paper, we introduce the novel concept of “social features for process-oriented business objects” that extends existing research on the Social Network of Business Objects (SoNBO). In SoNBO, ...data is extracted from heterogenous source systems in the form of business objects and a user-specific knowledge graph is generated and used as a navigation structure in a web application (the so-called SoNBO Explorer). Up to now, the SoNBO Explorer has been limited to information retrieval and access, which is now enriched with interactive functionality, the so called “social features”, that allow the user to add content and thus interact with the information objects. The solution builds on the idea of “social profiles” that are used to represent people in Enterprise Social Networks and extends this idea to business objects. People and objects become (equal) nodes in a knowledge graph on which the user can perform (social) functionality (e.g. following, liking, commenting, tagging, etc.). This way the idiosyncratic functionalities of human-centred collaboration software is applied to process-aware ERP systems. We present the formalisation of our concept in the Social Business Object Ontology (SoBOOnt).
Enterprise social software platforms (ESSPs) have emerged as an important infrastructure that enables teams to perform in the turbulent business environment. The current study adds to the scanty ...literature on ESSP by revealing and confirming the underlying mechanisms through which ESSP contributes to a team's ability to improvise. By surveying current ESSP users, we find that ESSP exercises its effect on team improvisation ability through team social capital as an important mediator. However, our results confirm the existence of two distinctive mediation mechanisms. First, intra-team ESSP use shapes improvisation ability through a team's internal bonding social capital partially, whereas inter-team ESSP use contributes to improvisation ability through external bonding social capital fully. Second, intra-team (not inter-team) ESSP use casts an additional impact on improvisation ability through within-team (not outside-team) bridging social capital; however, this mediation effect exists only among teams that are equipped with a high level of absorptive capacity. Therefore, the current research sheds new lights on the ESSP and contributes to the research on information technology-assisted team improvisation. Our findings also inform practitioners in leveraging ESSP for enhancement of the improvisation ability of teams in the workplace.
► Knowledge management as IS implementations that enable knowledge processes. ► Knowledge management builds protective capabilities in firms. ► Knowledge management evolves through the increasing use ...of social software. ► New strategic research agenda on knowledge management by social software.
Knowledge management is commonly understood as IS implementations that enable processes of knowledge creation, sharing, and capture. Knowledge management at the firm level is changing rapidly. Previous approaches included centrally managed, proprietary knowledge repositories, often involving structured and controlled search and access. Today the trend is toward knowledge management by social software, which provides open and inexpensive alternatives to traditional implementations. While social software carries great promise for knowledge management, this also raises fundamental questions about the very essence and value of firm knowledge, the possibility for knowledge protection, firm boundaries, and the sources of competitive advantage. I draft a strategic research agenda consisting of five fundamental issues that should reinvigorate research in knowledge management.
Software development is a collaborative task. Previous research has shown social aspects within development teams to be highly relevant for the success of software projects. A team’s mood has been ...proven to be particularly important. It is paramount for project managers to be aware of negative moods within their teams, as such awareness enables them to intervene. Sentiment analysis tools offer a way to determine the mood of a team based on textual communication.
We aim to help developers or stakeholders in their choice of sentiment analysis tools for their specific purpose. Therefore, we conducted a systematic mapping study (SMS).
We present the results of our SMS of sentiment analysis tools developed for or applied in the context of software engineering (SE). Our results summarize insights from 106 papers with respect to (1) the application domain, (2) the purpose, (3) the used data sets, (4) the approaches for developing sentiment analysis tools, (5) the usage of already existing tools, and (6) the difficulties researchers face. We analyzed in more detail which tools and approaches perform how in terms of their performance.
According to our results, sentiment analysis is frequently applied to open-source software projects, and most approaches are neural networks or support-vector machines. The best performing approach in our analysis is neural networks and the best tool is BERT. Despite the frequent use of sentiment analysis in SE, there are open issues, e.g. regarding the identification of irony or sarcasm, pointing to future research directions.
We conducted an SMS to gain an overview of the current state of sentiment analysis in order to help developers or stakeholders in this matter. Our results include interesting findings e.g. on the used tools and their difficulties. We present several suggestions on how to solve these identified problems.
Software engineering is now more than ever a community effort. Its success often weighs on balancing distance, culture, global engineering practices and more. In this scenario many unforeseen ...socio-technical events may result into additional project cost or "social" debt, e.g., sudden, collective employee turnover. With industrial research we discovered community smells , that is, sub-optimal patterns across the organisational and social structure in a software development community that are precursors of such nasty socio-technical events. To understand the impact of community smells at large, in this paper we first introduce CodeFace4Smells , an automated approach able to identify four community smell types that reflect socio-technical issues that have been shown to be detrimental both the software engineering and organisational research fields. Then, we perform a large-scale empirical study involving over 100 years worth of releases and communication structures data of 60 open-source communities: we evaluate (i) their diffuseness, i.e., how much are they distributed in open-source, (ii) how developers perceive them, to understand whether practitioners recognize their presence and their negative effects in practice, and (iii) how community smells relate to existing socio-technical factors, with the aim of assessing the inter-relations between them. The key findings of our study highlight that community smells are highly diffused in open-source and are perceived by developers as relevant problems for the evolution of software communities. Moreover, a number of state-of-the-art socio-technical indicators (e.g., socio-technical congruence) can be used to monitor how healthy a community is and possibly avoid the emergence of social debt.
The use of BPM (Business Process Management) has matured over the years, reaching high levels of acceptance and utilization. Despite this, there are still points that BPM does not fully resolve. One ...of the main limitations of the use of BPM is the lack of a complete acquisition of valuable information during the design stage, taking place in contexts where communication between the stakeholders is not appropriate and it is not possible to fully collect essential data. At the execution stage, the participation of users has not been studied in depth to record detected problems or indicate improvements in business processes. The emergence and development of Web 2.0 opened a way to solve these problems. This work proposes to base how the socialization tools can solve current problems in BPM through a theoretical analysis added to the practical development of a socialization tool integrated to a BPMS (Business Process Management System).
Nowadays, people from different geographical areas can be closely related thanks to advances in information and communication technologies. This has a greater impact in software development ...organizations where their members form virtual work teams. In these new co-located work scenarios, the construction of interpersonal trust is more complex and its impact is very relevant in the performance of software development teams. This paper presents the results of the performanceevaluation of four pre-trained language models based on BERT applied to trust analysis tasks. For this work, a small dataset of 1453 comments obtained from software projects stored on Github was created. The evaluated language models achieved moderately good values, in the order of 0.84 for the F1-score metric, which augurs that with further research they could be significantly improved.
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