Article

Do developers discuss design?

Authors:

Dalton SereyAuthors Info & Claims

MSR 2014: Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Pages 340 - 343

https://doi.org/10.1145/2597073.2597115

Published: 31 May 2014 Publication History

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Abstract

Design is often raised in the literature as important to attaining various properties and characteristics in a software system. At least for open-source projects, it can be hard to find evidence of ongoing design work in the technical artifacts produced as part of the development. Although developers usually do not produce specific design documents, they do communicate about design in different ways. In this paper, we provide quantitative evidence that developers address design through discussions in commits, issues, and pull requests. To achieve this, we built a discussions' classifier and automatically labeled 102,122 discussions from 77 projects. Based on this data, we make four observations about the projects: i) on average, 25% of the discussions in a project are about design; ii) on average, 26% of developers contribute to at least one design discussion; iii) only 1% of the developers contribute to more than 15% of the discussions in a project; and iv) these few developers who contribute to a broad range of design discussions are also the top committers in a project.

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Coutinho DCito LLima MArantes BAlves Pereira JArriel JGodinho JMartins VLibório PLeite LGarcia AAssunção WSteinmacher IBaffa AFonseca B(2024)"Looks Good To Me ;-)": Assessing Sentiment Analysis Tools for Pull Request DiscussionsProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661189(211-221)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661167.3661189
Khalajzadeh HShahin MObie HAgrawal PGrundy J(2023)Supporting Developers in Addressing Human-Centric Issues in Mobile AppsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.321232949:4(2149-2168)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3212329
Liang JArab MKo MKo ALaToza TGrundy JPollock LPenta M(2023)A Qualitative Study on the Implementation Design Decisions of DevelopersProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00047(435-447)Online publication date: 14-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00047
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Index Terms

Do developers discuss design?
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Software implementation planning
        Software design techniques
    2. Software development process management

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Information

Published In

MSR 2014: Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

May 2014

427 pages

ISBN:9781450328630

DOI:10.1145/2597073

General Chair:
Premkumar Devanbu
University of California at Davis, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Sung Kim
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
,
Martin Pinzger
University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 31 May 2014

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ICSE '14

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SIGSOFT

ICSE '14: 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 31 - June 1, 2014

Hyderabad, India

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ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

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Cited By

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Coutinho DCito LLima MArantes BAlves Pereira JArriel JGodinho JMartins VLibório PLeite LGarcia AAssunção WSteinmacher IBaffa AFonseca B(2024)"Looks Good To Me ;-)": Assessing Sentiment Analysis Tools for Pull Request DiscussionsProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661189(211-221)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661167.3661189
Khalajzadeh HShahin MObie HAgrawal PGrundy J(2023)Supporting Developers in Addressing Human-Centric Issues in Mobile AppsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.321232949:4(2149-2168)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3212329
Liang JArab MKo MKo ALaToza TGrundy JPollock LPenta M(2023)A Qualitative Study on the Implementation Design Decisions of DevelopersProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00047(435-447)Online publication date: 14-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00047
Seker ADiri BArslan HAmasyalı M(2022)Open Source Software Development ChallengesResearch Anthology on Agile Software, Software Development, and Testing10.4018/978-1-6684-3702-5.ch102(2134-2164)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-3702-5.ch102
Dhaouadi MOakes BFamelis M(2022)End-to-End Rationale ReconstructionProceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3551349.3559547(1-5)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2022
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Feng ZChatterjee ASarma AAhmed IRoychoudhury ACadar CKim M(2022)A case study of implicit mentoring, its prevalence, and impact in ApacheProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3549167(797-809)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
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Zampetti FNardone VDi Penta MLo DMcIntosh SNovielli N(2022)Problems and solutions in applying continuous integration and delivery to 20 open-source cyber-physical systemsProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3524842.3527948(646-657)Online publication date: 23-May-2022
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Khalajzadeh HShahin MObie HGrundy JBegel ABlincoe K(2022)How are diverse end-user human-centric issues discussed on GitHub?Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society10.1145/3510458.3513014(79-89)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
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Viviani GMurphy G(2022)What really is software design?2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00046(301-308)Online publication date: Mar-2022
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Khalajzadeh HShahin MObie HGrundy J(2022)How are Diverse End-user Human-centric Issues Discussed on GitHub?2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS)10.1109/ICSE-SEIS55304.2022.9794018(79-89)Online publication date: May-2022
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