Abstract With the emergence of social coding platforms, collaboration has become a key and dynamic aspect to the success of software projects. In such platforms, developers have to collaborate and deal with issues of collaboration in open‐source software development. Although collaboration is challenging, collaborative development produces better software systems than any developer could produce alone. Several approaches have investigated collaboration challenges, for instance, by proposing or evaluating models and tools to support collaborative work. Despite the undeniable importance of the existing efforts in this direction, there are few works on collaboration from perspectives of developers. In this work, we aim to investigate the perceptions of open‐source software developers on collaborations, such as motivations, techniques, and tools to support global, productive, and collaborative development. Following an ad hoc literature review, an exploratory interview study with 12 open‐source software developers fromGitHub, our novel approach for this problem also relies on an extensive survey with 121 developers to confirm or refute the interview results. We found different collaborative contributions, such as managing change requests. Besides, we observed that most collaborators prefer to collaborate with the core team instead of their peers. We also found that most collaboration happens in software development (60%) and maintenance (47%) tasks. Furthermore, despite personal preferences to work independently, developers still consider collaborating with others in specific task categories, for instance, software development. Finally, developers also expressed the importance of the social coding platforms, such asGitHub, to support maintainers, and contributors in making decisions and developing tasks of the projects. Therefore, these findings may help project leaders optimize the collaborations among developers and reduce entry barriers. Moreover, these findings may support the project collaborators in understanding the collaboration process and engaging others in the project.

Summary Software developers must collaborate at all stages of the software life‐cycle to create successful complex software systems. To enable this collaboration, social coding platforms, for example, GitHub, include an increasing number of tools to support collaboration. However, for large projects with hundreds of dynamic developers, such as several successful open–source projects, it can be complex to find developers with the same interest and familiarity and thus, gain suitable collaborations and new insights. In this context, resources and efforts may be wasted, discouraging many developers from contributing. Moreover, it can be costly to manage many contributions, which is another challenge for the maintainer who wants to take advantage of this small, timid, but valuable contribution made by a volunteer developer in a short time. In this context, this paper presents an empirical study aiming to evaluate two strategies to recommend collaborators based on co‐changed files. Inspired in the TF–IDF (Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency) weighting scheme established in the Information Retrieval field, these strategies first estimate the importance of relevant files modified by developers and use these estimates to represent each developer “profile”. As a second step, they estimate the similarity between developers using the Cosine metric, providing top‐ranked developers according to this measure as recommendations. We evaluated these strategies based on an extensive survey with 102 real–world developers. We observed that developers have interest and familiarity with the co‐changed files for all strategies evaluated. These considerations are of relevance because many opportunities for contributions to the project are linked to coding. Thus, theses results may indicate one less barrier for improving collaboration among developers. Overall, the strategies present an acceptance rate of up to 81%, contributing to the discovery of further collaborators.

Successful software projects require engaged collaborators interacting with each other across the entire development life-cycle. Unfortunately, for social coding platforms, e.g., GitHub, identifying a suitable collaborator to strengthen their ties and improve their engagement in the project is challenging, given that reliable information for collaborator identification is often not readily available. In this work, we propose and evaluate a collaborator recommendation tool - CoopFinder - to help developers find collaborators in a specific project based on similar interests related to co–changed files. We design our Web prototype–tool using visualization techniques. As a result of the preliminary user study, we observed that 95% of the participants had positive impressions of the tool. Furthermore, 75% of participants stated that they would use the tool in their daily lives or recommend it to others. Repository: https://github.com/kattiana/CoopFinder;

In globally distributed software development, many software developers have to collaborate and deal with issues of collaboration. Although collaboration is challenging, collaborative development produces better software than any developer could produce alone. Unlike previous work which focuses on the proposal and evaluation of models and tools to support collaborative work, this paper presents an interview study aiming to understand (i) the motivations, (ii) how collaboration happens, and (iii) the challenges and barriers of collaborative software development. After interviewing twelve experienced software developers from GitHub, we found different types of collaborative contributions, such as in the management of requests for changes. Our analysis also indicates that the main barriers for collaboration are related to non-technical, rather than technical issues.

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. Gamification is a relatively new trend that has been applied in various domains, including Software Engineering. However, few studies have explored the potential of gamification in the context of Software Engineering education. In this paper, we describe an experience of introducing two game elements, namely badges and leaderboards, in an introductory Software Engineering course. Our goal is to evaluate the students' perception on the impact of these elements in their motivation towards the course. We conducted a survey with 18 participants for quantitative results, and a series of interviews with 6 participants for a qualitative perspective on the results. We observed that students received badges positively, while there were mixed results about the use of leaderboards in our strategy. The main benefits on the use of these elements is that they provide social recognition rewards for students. In addition, the use of badges establishes further objectives for students to strive for, besides grades and approval.

In the last decades, software product lines (SPL) have proven to be an efficient software development technique in industries due its capability to increase quality and productivity and decrease cost and time-to-market through extensive reuse of software artifacts. To achieve these benefits, tool support is fundamental to guide industries during the SPL development life-cycle. However, many different SPL tools are available nowadays and the adoption of the appropriate tool is a big challenge in industries. In order to support engineers choosing a tool that best fits their needs, this paper presents the results of a controlled empirical study to assess two Eclipse-based tools, namely FeatureIDE and pure::variants. This empirical study involved 84 students who used and evaluated both tools. The main weakness we observe in both tools are the lack adequate mechanisms for managing the variability, such as for product configuration. As a strength, we observe the automated analysis and the feature model editor.