CAREER: Expanding Developers' Usage of Software Tools by Enabling Social Learning

Creating and maintaining software is an increasing challenge for software developers. Software development tools can help meet this challenge, but most developers use only a small subset of the available tools because they are unaware of the existence of relevant tools. To learn about relevant tools, prior work suggests that most effective approach is social learning, where a developer learns about a tool from a peer, yet research also suggests that social tool learning is rare. The aim of this research is to increase the frequency and effectiveness of social tool learning, and in turn, fundamentally advance our understanding of how technology can mediate tool learning in software development and beyond. In reaching this aim, we will help improve the software on which people increasingly rely.

The researchers will create a testbed system that will record a continuous screencast of the developer's work, indexed with time-stamped data on tool usage. By comparing the developer's tool usage data with her peers', the system selects a list of candidate tools that the developer does not use, but that her peers do use. The system then encourages peers to teach and learn from one another by sharing tool-usage clips chosen from each others' screencasts. The approach aims to enable distributed and asynchronous developers to share tool knowledge efficiently, effectively, and frequently. The testbed will allow the researchers to experiment with various types of tool learning to determine how, why, and when different types of tool learning are effective or ineffective.