Creating a shared understanding of testing culture on a social coding site

Authors:
Raphael Pham;Leif Singer;Olga Liskin;Fernando Figueira Filho;Kurt Schneider
Affiliations:
Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany;Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany;Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany;UFRN, Brazil;Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
Year:
2013

Citing 13
Cited 2

A case study of open source software development: the Apache server

Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering
Self-organization of teams for free/libre open source software development

Information and Software Technology
Understanding knowledge sharing activities in free/open source software projects: An empirical study

Journal of Systems and Software
Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams

Empirical Software Engineering
Keeping up with your friends: function Foo, library Bar.DLL, and work item 24

Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering
Creating and evolving developer documentation: understanding the decisions of open source contributors

Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
The impact of social media on software engineering practices and tools

Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on Future of software engineering research
Measuring API documentation on the web

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering
The impact of ideology on effectiveness in open source software development teams

MIS Quarterly
Sociotechnical coordination and collaboration in open source software

ICSM '11 Proceedings of the 2011 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
Social transparency in networked information exchange: a theoretical framework

Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Social coding in GitHub: transparency and collaboration in an open software repository

Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Test confessions: a study of testing practices for plug-in systems

Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering

Building test suites in social coding sites by leveraging drive-by commits

Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
Social influences on secure development tool adoption: why security tools spread

Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Many software development projects struggle with creating and communicating a testing culture that is appropriate for the project's needs. This may degrade software quality by leaving defects undiscovered. Previous research suggests that social coding sites such as GitHub provide a collaborative environment with a high degree of social transparency. This makes developers' actions and interactions more visible and traceable. We conducted interviews with 33 active users of GitHub to investigate how the increased transparency found on GitHub influences developers' testing behaviors. Subsequently, we validated our findings with an online questionnaire that was answered by 569 members of GitHub. We found several strategies that software developers and managers can use to positively influence the testing behavior in their projects. However, project owners on GitHub may not be aware of them. We report on the challenges and risks caused by this and suggest guidelines for promoting a sustainable testing culture in software development projects.