Abstract: Social networking systems help people maintain connections to their friends, enabling awareness, communication, and collaboration, especially at a distance. In many studies of coordination in software engineering, we have learned that work artifacts, e.g. code, bugs, specifications, are themselves the objects that link engineers together. In this talk, I introduce Codebook, a social networking web service in which people can be “friends” not only with other people but with the work artifacts they share with them. Providing a variety of user interfaces to the graph of these connections will enable software engineers to keep track of task dependencies, discover and maintain connections to other teams, and understand the history and rationale behind the code that they work on and use.

Bio:

Andrew Begel is a researcher in the Human Interactions in Programming group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA. He studies software engineers at Microsoft to understand how they communicate, collaborate and coordinate, and how this impacts their effectiveness in collocated and distributed development. After conducting studies, he builds collaboration tools to help mitigate the issues that were discovered.