Seminar by Dr. Bogdan Nicolae Vasilescu (University of California, Davis)

Speaker: Dr. Bogdan Nicolae Vasilescu
                University of California, Davis

Title: Lessons in Social Coding: Software Analytics in the Age of GitHub

Date: Friday, February 5th, 2016

Time: 10:30AM - 12PM

Place: EV2.184

ABSTRACT

Social media has forever changed the ways in which we communicate and work, programming included. This “social coding” movement made popular by GitHub (code is meant to be shared!) has come to represent a paradigm shift in software development, especially in the open-source world. Today, 12 million people are responsible for 30 million repositories, and popular projects have communities the size of small cities, while all coordination happens online. To facilitate this growth, many innovations have been introduced, including the pull request model and continuous integration.

This talk reports on recent software analytics work that aims to understand and streamline the social coding process, in order to alleviate the growing pains. I will explore GitHub from three perspectives. The first perspective is that of individual developers, faced with a great diversity of projects. How do people choose which projects to contribute to? Does prior technical experience matter, or do people learn on the job? Is it efficient to work on many projects in parallel? 

The second perspective is that of project maintainers, faced with ever-increasing pull request review loads. What are the main factors that slow down pull request reviews? How does automation help developers do more with less? Does continuous integration help to ensure higher quality code?

The third perspective is that of community designers. It’s no surprise that women are underrepresented in open-source (roughly 10%) compared to big tech companies like Google and Microsoft (17-18%). However, on social coding platforms like GitHub and Stack Overflow, the situation is worse still. Why are social coding platforms so exclusive? Is it related to community design? Is it intrinsic to modern, successful software teams? How does diversity in software teams affect productivity and code quality?

I will try to answer some of these questions in this talk.

BIO

Bogdan Vasilescu is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Davis (USA), where he is a member of the Davis Eclectic Computational Analytics Lab (DECAL). He received his PhD and MSc in Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology, both with cum laude distinction. His PhD dissertation won the best dissertation award from the Dutch Institute for Programming Research and Algorithmics in 2015. Bogdan is engaged in interdisciplinary research that aims to understand and streamline software development in increasingly larger, more distributed, and more diverse teams. His work draws from empirical software engineering, social computing, and computer-supported cooperative work. Follow him on Twitter @b_vasilescu.