Influencing the Adoption of Software Engineering Methods Using Social Software

The slides for the talk I gave at ICSE 2012 in Zürich. The accompanying paper is linked to from http://leif.me.

Transcript

1. Software Engineering Group Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany Leif Singer, Kurt Schneider Influencing the Adoption of Software Engineering Methods Using Social Software leif.me | @lsinger
2. Adoption Issues for SE Practices Politics Technology Complexity Education Bureaucracy Perceived Utility
3. Adoption Issues for SE Practices Politics Technology Complexity Education Bureaucracy Perceived Utility “No, we don’t have a repository. We just zip the whole project and email it to each other.” [industry project]
4. Mandation – not enough. [Riemenschneider2002] individual developer acceptance is far from assured even in the presence of an organizational mandate “ ”
5. Knowledge & Attitude – not enough. KAP gap [Rogers2003]
6. What’s missing? Motivation! Needed for mastering new skills and applying them. [Ryan2000]
7. Motivators for Software Engineers [Beecham2008] Autonomy! Independence! Inclusion in Decisions! Challenges!
8. Motivators for Software Engineers [Beecham2008] Autonomy! Independence! Inclusion in Decisions! Challenges! Very much not mandation.
9. Leverage Social Software [Burke2009]: showing peer behavior can lead to imitation [Restivo2012]: virtual awards given by peers can increase productivity [Landers2011]: earning ranks for competence can increase engagement
10. A method to change practices De ne Goals & Metrics Recommendations for Change Derive Events & Combined Metrics Translate into Software
11. Example Student Project: Some never commit. Many commits without messages. Goal 1: more commits, more evenly spread out over time. Goal 2: more commits with commit messages. De ne Goals & Metrics ‣ commits per developer, time between commits, message length, ...
12. Example Spread existing behavior: show what peers do Provide jumpstart: ranking positive feedback (noti cation e-mails) Support feeling of competence: goals for noticing own progress Recommendations for Change
13. Example Derive Events & Combined Metrics Commit User Team Commits / User Commits / Team Team-Milestone User-Milestone Notification Notification Digest
14. Example Translate into Software
15. Experiment! leif.me/nier Can others apply our method? Add your e-mail address to participate!
16. Summary • Suboptimal adoption of SE practices • Leverage e ects of Social Software • Method provides & explains possibilities, warns of pitfalls • Clear the way for intrinsic motivations • Slides, papers: leif.me
17. References [Riemenschneider2002] C.K. Riemenschneider, B.C. Hardgrave, and F.D. Davis. Explaining software developer acceptance of methodologies: A comparison of five theoretical models. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 28(12): 1135–1145, 2002. [Rogers2003] Rogers, E.M. Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. FreePress, 2003. [Ryan2000] Ryan, R. M. & Deci, E. L. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist, 51(1):, 68-78, 2000. [Beecham2008] S. Beecham, N. Baddoo, T. Hall, H. Robinson, and H. Sharp. Motivation in Software Engineering: A systematic literature review. Information and Software Technology, 50(9- 10):860–878, 2008. [Burke2009] M. Burke, C. Marlow, and T. Lento. Feed me: motivating newcomer contribution in social network sites. In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 945–954. ACM, 2009. [Landers2011] R. N. Landers and R. C. Callan. Casual Social Games as Serious Games: The Psychology of Gamification in Undergraduate Education and Employee Training. Serious Games and Edutainment Applications, pages 399– 423, 2011. [Restivo2012] Restivo, M. & van de Rijt, A. Experimental Study of Informal Rewards in Peer Production. PLoS ONE: 7(3): e34358, 2012.