Keynote: Selecting Research Methods for Studying a Participatory Culture in Software Development

Recent innovations in social media have led to a paradigm shift in software development, with highly tuned participatory development cultures contributing to crowdsourced content and being supported by media that have become increasingly more social and transparent. Never before in the history of software development have we seen such rapid adoption of new tools by software developers. But there are many unanswered questions about the impact this tool adoption has on the quality of the software, the productivity and skills of the developers, the growth of projects and technologies developers contribute to, and how users can give feedback on and guide the software they use. Answering these questions is not trivial as this participatory development culture has become a virtual network of tightly coupled ecosystems consisting of developers, shared content and media channels. In our studies, we have found that combining research methods from the social sciences with data mining and software analytics to be the most promising in terms of revealing benefits and challenges from this adoption of social tools. In this talk, I share some of the findings from our studies, discuss the particular research methods we have used, and share our experiences from using those research methods. I also discuss how we as researchers leverage social tools and interact with the participatory development culture to assist with and help us gain feedback on our research. I close with a discussion about how other software engineering researchers could benefit from using social tools and the challenges they may face while doing so.