Investigating the use of tags in collaborative development environments: a replicated study

  • Authors:
  • Fabio Calefato;Domenico Gendarmi;Filippo Lanubile

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Bari, Bari;University of Bari, Bari;University of Bari, Bari

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Modern collaborative development environments have recently introduced tagging as a new feature in order to let developers annotate software artifacts with free keywords. Since tagging has the potential to have an impact on task management in software development processes, there is a need to understand how developers use tagging in projects supported by collaborative development environments and how developers' behavior differ from collaborative tagging in the Social Web. We have conducted an independent replication of an empirical study, which first investigated how tags are used in a large software project. In our replication, we have analyzed two further projects coordinated through two different collaborative development environments, Jazz and Trac. The findings from our replicated study extend the initial contribution of the original study by (1) showing evidence of differences in tag usage between the two collaborative development environments, and (2) providing a clear understanding that tags used in such environments significantly differs from those used in traditional collaborative tagging systems.