Article

Using developer conversations to resolve uncertainty in software development: a position paper

Authors:

Ahmed Shah Mashiyat,

Michalis Famelis,

Rick Salay,

Marsha ChechikAuthors Info & Claims

RSSE 2014: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Recommendation Systems for Software Engineering

Pages 1 - 5

https://doi.org/10.1145/2593822.2593823

Published: 03 June 2014 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

Software development is a social process: tasks such as implementing a requirement or fixing a bug typically spark conversations between the stakeholders of a software project, where they identify points of uncertainty in the solution space and explore proposals to resolve them. Due to the fluid nature of these interactions, it is hard for project managers to maintain an overall understanding of the state of the discussion and to know when and how to intervene. We propose an approach for extracting the uncertainty information from developer conversations in order to provide managers with analytics. Using these allows us to recommend specific actions that managers can take to better facilitate the resolution of uncertainty.

References

[1]

A. Auger and J. Roy. Expression of Uncertainty in Linguistic Data. In Proc. of ICIF’08, pages 1–8, 2008.

Google Scholar

[2]

M. Famelis, Rick Salay, and M. Chechik. Partial Models: Towards Modeling and Reasoning with Uncertainty. In Proc. of ICSE’12, pages 573–583, 2012.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

B. Goujon. Uncertainty Detection for Information Extraction. In Proc. of RANLP’09, 2009.

Google Scholar

[4]

E. Knauss and D. Damian. V: ISSUE: LIZER: Exploring Requirements Clarification in Online Communication Over Time. In Proc. of ICSE’13, pages 1327–1330, 2013.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

H.J. Steinhauer, A. Karlsson, and S.F. Andler. Traceable Uncertainty. In Proc. of FUSION’13, pages 1582–1589, 2013.

Google Scholar

[6]

M. Strohmaier. Purpose Tagging: Capturing User Intent to Assist Goal-oriented Social Search. In Proc. of SSM’08, pages 35–42, 2008.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

M. Taboada and W. C. MANN. Rhetorical Structure Theory: Looking Back and Moving Ahead. J. Discourse Studies, 8:423–459, 2006.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[8]

D. Verbree, R. Rienks, and D. Heylen. First Steps Towards the Automatic Construction of Argument-Diagrams from Real Discussions. In Proc. of COMMA’06, pages 183–194, 2006.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[9]

H. Yang, A. De Roeck, V. Gervasi, A. Willis, and B. Nuseibeh. Speculative Requirements: Automatic Detection of Uncertainty in Natural Language Requirements. In Proc. of RE’12, pages 11–20, 2012.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Viviani GFamelis MXia XJanik-Jones CMurphy G(2021)Locating Latent Design Information in Developer Discussions: A Study on Pull RequestsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.292400647:7(1402-1413)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2924006
Famelis MChechik M(2019)Managing design-time uncertaintySoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-017-0594-918:2(1249-1284)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10270-017-0594-9
Viviani GJanik-Jones CFamelis MMurphy GSharp Hde Souza CGraziotin DLevy MSocha D(2018)The structure of software design discussionsProceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/3195836.3195841(104-107)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3195836.3195841

Index Terms

Using developer conversations to resolve uncertainty in software development: a position paper
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Metrics
2. Software and its engineering

Recommendations

Dealing with Uncertainty: A Survey of Theories and Practices

Uncertainty accompanies our life processes and covers almost all fields of scientific studies. Two general categories of uncertainty, namely, aleatory uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty, exist in the world. While aleatory uncertainty refers to the ...
Managing uncertainty in software projects

Although it is impossible to predict problems that will occur in software projects, project managers can employ strategies that imbue their projects with greater resilience. Throughout a software project, a series of practices can be established to ...
Pragmatic characteristics of security conversations: an exploratory linguistic analysis
CHASE '19: Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

Experts suggest that engineering secure software requires a defensive mindset to be ingrained in developer culture, which could be reflected in conversation. But what does a conversation about software security in a real project look like? Linguists ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

RSSE 2014: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Recommendation Systems for Software Engineering

June 2014

31 pages

ISBN:9781450328456

DOI:10.1145/2593822

Program Chairs:
Reid Holmes,
Werner Janjic,
Walid Maalej

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 June 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

ICSE '14

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ICSE '14: 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

June 3, 2014

Hyderabad, India

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

3
Total Citations
View Citations
194
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)0
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 15 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Viviani GFamelis MXia XJanik-Jones CMurphy G(2021)Locating Latent Design Information in Developer Discussions: A Study on Pull RequestsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.292400647:7(1402-1413)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2924006
Famelis MChechik M(2019)Managing design-time uncertaintySoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-017-0594-918:2(1249-1284)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10270-017-0594-9
Viviani GJanik-Jones CFamelis MMurphy GSharp Hde Souza CGraziotin DLevy MSocha D(2018)The structure of software design discussionsProceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/3195836.3195841(104-107)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3195836.3195841

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Dealing with Uncertainty: A Survey of Theories and Practices

Managing uncertainty in software projects

Pragmatic characteristics of security conversations: an exploratory linguistic analysis