Supporting Software Development as Knowledge Community Evolution

We view software project as a knowledge ecology consisting of three interrelated elements: (1) artifacts, (2) individual developers, and (3) a community of developers. How developers relate with each other in the community affects how they share knowledge during the development and therefore impacts the overall quality of the software system that have to be built through continuous knowledge collaboration. This paper analyzes this social relation and its impacts on software development, and presents an approach to help developers make use of peer expertise by asking and helping other developers. It then describes the STeP_IN (Socio-Technical Platform for In situ Networking) framework to illustrate the approach.