Prior research indicates that trust and cooperation amongst unfamiliar collaborators in remote locations is crucial to Global Software Engineering (GSE) practices. Furthermore, trust and cooperation development requires proper social or technical mediations. Our prior empirical research demonstrates that informal, non-work-related conversation (a.k.a, "cheap talk") over the internet correlates with higher trust and better cooperation. This empirical observation inspired us to hypothesize that cheap talk may also bring about better trust and cooperation. We conducted three related studies to investigate how cheap talk influenced the emergence and diffusion of trust and cooperation in GSE teams. Using game theory, we performed theoretical analyses and agent-based modeling and simulation in which we abstracted GSE collaboration to a variation of the classic stag hunt game. We empirically studied the project communication records of Apache Lucene and Google Chromium OS to validate our approach and to provide a context for our three studies.

The results of the three studies revealed the following. First, all three studies revealed that cheap talk over the internet positively influences trust and cooperation development among GSE practitioners. Second, cheap talk over the internet often functioned as "catalyst" and might disappear once trust and cooperation become a team norm. Third, proper seeding strategies would improve the effectiveness and efficiency of trust and cooperation development when considering the social network's effect. Last, but not least, individuals' baseline trust significantly impacted the dynamics of trust and cooperation development. Our results and findings have important implications for theory development, GSE practices, and research methodology. Theoretically, we developed descriptions and explanations. Practically, the results and findings led to implications for collaboration management, and potential data-driven tools that support game theory analytics. Methodologically, we demonstrated the feasibility of using together, game theory, social network analysis, and agent-based modeling simulation to investigate software engineering's human and social aspects.

Software developers often seek to be a part of a new company, team, or even a different project within the same team. The decision to choose a developer who may be an appropriate fit may be made by evaluators such as team leads or recruiters. The developer may have information about his/her technical and social competency available on a resume and/or may have the raw data from technically-relevant activity publicly accessible on various social media platforms such as GitHub and Stack Overflow. An evaluator could go through each of these information sources manually or may choose to utilize Developer Profile Aggregators such as CoderWall or Visual Resume. Such aggregators tend to employ a browsing-style interface, which means the evaluator may need to search extensively for the information (s)he may be looking for.

We researched the kinds of questions that evaluators may have that could be directly answered by the information available from the abovementioned sources. This was then used to develop an interface to more directly filter and view the answers to these questions. This system is called TecSo Lens and it is based on a previous browsing aggregator tool, Visual Resume. The questions and the answers that represent the data are also related to the factors that could influence trust during this evaluation process.

Successful software engineering activities require qualified software developers with proper expertise. Although expertise has been studied for many years and various expertise location approaches have been postulated, new approaches and opportunities are emerging today because of the rise of code hosting and knowledge sharing sites. As a step towards understanding the past work and the present opportunities in the context of today's software engineering practice, we perform a systematic literature survey. In analyzing the literature, we identify two broad categories of expertise research: 1) identifying the characteristics of experts, and 2) locating experts. The studies in the latter category can be further classified into three subcategories, which are: i) locating expertise by leveraging the organizational setting; ii) by mining historical artifacts; and iii) by knowledge sharing. Our analysis also identifies the major limitations of existing work, including a disconnect between early expertise studies and current location approaches; an over reliance on the experience-based model to measure expertise; a neglect on the constraints for coordination; and a lack of empirical evaluation in the real-world context, among others. Finally, we highlight research trends and promising directions for future research.

Geographically distributed collaboration has become the common way to work in many industries. Collaborative tools for supporting distributed work in complex work environments rely on information and communication technology to enable meaningful, rich interactions in the distributed team. Virtual world technology has advanced rapidly in recent years and public virtual worlds draw millions of users. Innovative, natural user interfaces have become more broadly available at lower costs, opening up virtual world technologies to a broader range of applications. The lower barrier to entry creates opportunities in CSCW to apply virtual world technology in collaborative tools for distributed teams. Yet, there are only few systems built specifically for collaborative activities using virtual world technology and our understanding of how users collaborate in virtual world environments is still very limited. In this dissertation I sought to discuss the implementation and evaluation of INspect-World, a collaborative tool for conducting and managing distributed usability inspections. In two empirical qualitative studies I observed, analyzed, and documented collaborative behaviors and strategies performed in the INspect-World virtual world environment. I found that users developed unique collaborative strategies in the contexts of team building, interacting on a level playing field, using virtual scaffolding mechanisms, and working with rules in the open virtual space. The qualitative findings represent an important stepping stone between the past and the future of applying virtual world technology in collaborative tools for geographically distributed work.

Distributed teams have become increasingly prevalent. However, distance brings challenges in practice, and chief among them is the development of trusting and cohesive relationships. By contrast, in co-located settings, informal social interactions beyond purely task-oriented communication support trust and cohesion building. This research fills the gap by exploring, in two related studies, how to use online playful activities to encourage informal social interactions at work and at a distance. The first study identifies the potential to use open-ended, freeform drawing to jumpstart trust, cohesion, and positive emotions in a distributed team setting. The results reveal that there are four core facets of the experience afforded by online playful activities: expressivity, reflection, interactivity, and playfulness. These results suggest that designing around the four facets could contribute to an engaging playful experience that would help teams build a common ground, support subjective affective expressions and experience, build up team knowledge in a relaxing social context, and promote positive emotional contagions. Thus, a prototype based on these findings was developed and tested in a short-term, in-situ study with five teams from industry contexts. The prototype supported asynchronous, anonymous, collaborative online drawing. We found that participants obtained an increased engaging experience and perceived trust, cohesion, and transient positive emotions over five days. Findings also identified the relationship between the four facets; namely, how each was influenced by the others. Based on findings from the two studies, as well as insights from previous, related research, we developed a theoretical model to capture the characteristics of online playful activities for distributed teams. This model leads to a design framework with eight concrete design guidelines that form a basis for system design for online playful activities for distributed teams.

By the late 80s, empirical research in various areas of Software Engineering has demonstrated the crucial roles of expert developers in engineering productivity. With recent advances in data digitization, computational power, and automated engineering processes, experts have unprecedented opportunities to leverage their expertise and amplify their impact on the outcomes of software projects. Recent research efforts are determined to identify, categorize and measure these critical human resources to make software engineering processes more efficient while also improving practitioners’ well-being simultaneously.

This dissertation advances our knowledge about the productivity factors relating to workflows of expert developer groups mainly in Open Source Software (OSS) and proposes a novel management framework to address major usability, customizability, and extensibility issues in applying small-scale automation. Through three main studies, this dissertation employed multiple methods to ensure its research resilience, including reviewing the literature, mining software repositories, testing statistical hypotheses, interviewing prospective users, and prototyping. In the first empirical study, I coherently grouped atomic platform event logs into sensible developer effort trends and associated elite developers’ activities with the outcomes of OSS projects and mainstream ecosystems. Its results suggested that as contributor communities evolve, increasing responsibility for non-coding tasks had a negative association with the technical outcomes of OSS projects. The second study investigated how practitioners automated the accumulating non-coding and repetitive tasks with small-scale automation, SE bots. Through a tiered and mixed-method approach, this study systematically identified and categorized the state-of-the-art SE bots that are prevalent in OSS practice from the top 1,000 popular repositories. Further, I leveraged semi-structured interviews with elite developers to confirm and refine their usability issues and expectations of SE bots. The final study summarizes design guidelines and provides a prototype for a Bot Management Console, which intends to address main usability issues when deploying and applying SE bots from daily practice. The practical effectiveness of this console has been validated by simulated deployments in real-world scenarios.

The main contributions of this dissertation include theoretical development on OSS literature, actionable recommendations for software practitioners, and practical implications on bot design and implementations. The reported results also provide future research directions for improving expert developers’ well-being, engineering productivity, and ultimately the sustainability of OSS communities.

Empirical evaluation of software systems in actual use is critical in software engineering. Prototyping, beta testing, and usability testing are widely employed to refine system requirements, to detect anomalous or unexpected system and user behavior, and to evaluate software usefulness and usability. The World Wide Web enables cheap, rapid, and large-scale distribution of software for evaluation purposes. However, current techniques for collecting usage data have not kept pace with the opportunities presented by Web-based deployment. This paper presents an agent-based approach and prototype system that makes large-scale collection of usage data over the Internet a practical possibility.

Empirical evaluation of software systems in actual usage situations is critical in software engineering. Prototyping, beta testing, and usability testing are widely used to refine system requirements, detect anomalous or unexpected system and user behavior, and to evaluate software usefulness and usability. The World Wide Web enables cheap, rapid, and large-scale distribution of software for evaluation purposes. However, current techniques for collecting usage data have not kept pace with the opportunities presented by Web-based deployment. This paper presents an approach and prototype system that makes large-scale collection of usage data over the Internet a practical possibility. A general framework for comparing software monitoring systems is presented and used to compare the proposed approach to existing techniques.

Coordinating work between many groups is an important issue for many complex tasks. While awareness tools are commonly used to enhance coordination within a group, this paper presents an awareness tool designed to enhance coordination between groups. This paper presents the Knowledge Depot Subscription Service and three studies which examine issues in providing this type of awareness and coordination.