Why Developers Are Slacking Off: Understanding How Software Teams Use Slack

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). CSCW ’16 Companion, February 27 March 02, 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA ACM 978-1-4503-3950-6/16/02. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2869117 Abstract Slack is a modern communication platform for teams that is seeing wide and rapid adoption by software development teams. Slack not only facilitates team messaging and archiving, but it also supports a wide plethora of integrations to external services and bots. We have found that Slack and its integrations (i.e., bots) are playing an increasingly significant role in software development, replacing email in some cases and disrupting software development processes. To understand how Slack impacts development team dynamics, we designed an exploratory study to investigate how developers use Slack and how they benefit from it. We find that developers use Slack for personal, teamwide and community-wide purposes. Our research also reveals that developers use and create diverse integrations (called bots) to support their work. This study serves as the first step towards understanding the role of Slack in supporting software engineering.