Adrian at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Work is presenting “To Talk or Not to Talk: Factors that Influence Communication around Changesets”. He went to Zurich to work with the IBM Rational Team Concert team located there, and interviewed them, applied surveys, and did personal observations. He found out that:

1. Release: Their discussions often were affected by their time within the release cycle. Early on in the cycle, developers were concerned about features, but as time went on, they were more concerned about the software being released, and were much more cautious about the change sets that were being applied.
2. Perception: The perception around the change set was also important. If the developer was giving off a good impression, then colleagues would monitor them less. Alternatively, if a developer is giving off a poor impression, then their changes may be more heavily scrutinized.
3. Risk Assessment: The developers were concerned about risk. High-risk change sets heavily encouraged developers to speak with each other. For example, if the change set was large, it was considered higher risk.
4. Business Goals: The developers were often conscientious about code quality, but were always under pressure to release features and fix bugs. This leads to the phenomenon known as technical debt, where the developers know that the fix is inelegant and ugly, but are often unable to fix it next cycle because management pressure continues to push the developers to release more features.

These considerations may have implications on collaborative recommender tools because they suggest the contexts under which the recommender system may have to adapt itself toward.

Adrian’s posted his slides here so you can take a look!

To talk or not to talk: factors that influence communication around changesets

Adrian Schröter, Jorge Aranda, Daniela Damian, Irwin Kwan
CSCW ’12 Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2012