562 research presentation

1. How Modern News
Aggregators Help
Development
Communities Shape
and Share
Knowledge
Topic:
• Developers rely on collaborative nature of Software
Development to exchange knowledge and learn new
technologies.
• Paper presents information on importance of news
aggregators in the developer community.
• Emphasis on role of communication channels within a
community of practice

2. Study
• Data contains posts, comments from Hacker News and
r/programming subreddit from Jan 2016 – April 2017
• From those posts, data such as “title”, “description”,
“author”, “url mentioned”, “user score”, “time stamp”,
“number of comments”, “comments per user” have been
extracted.
• Interviewees include 22 most active developers and posts
data includes randomly sampled 300 posts out of the total of
492,752 posts from Hacker News and 44,640 posts from
r/programming with a confidence interval of 95%.

3. Claims
Claim 1: Developers mainly choose news aggregators to
collaborate and share knowledge over Q & A sites
Claim 2: Size of Community, Scale of Interactions and Social
Features play a vital role in making news aggregators an
important source of s/w development collaboration
Claim 3: Programming-related news aggregators help
developers succeed in their careers

4. Evidence for
claims
• Claim 1:
Developers mainly choose news aggregators to collaborate
and share knowledge over Q & A sites.
• Evidence:
• Over 50% of survey respondents use news aggregators as a source
for new projects
• 68% affirmed that posts give them ideas to apply in their existing
projects as compared to Q&A sites that are mainly used for finding
solutions
• P1, P10,P12, P16-19 felt that Stack Overflow is not very welcoming
• On Hacker News: 55% IT related, 48% Software Development, 7%
AI, 10% Security posts
• r/programming 88% IT related, 74% Software Development, 4% AI,
6% Security posts

5. Evidence for
claims
• Claim 2:
Size of Community, Scale of Interactions and Social Features
play a vital role in making news aggregators an important
source of s/w development collaboration
Evidence:
• P6,P17,P19,P21 affirmed that an active subreddit helped
them promote their work, and share content
• P1,P4,P8,P12,P15 said that an active subreddit helped
them confidently post ideas and receive comments
• r/programming has 1,763,395 subscribers with people
using it at least:
• 34.3% - once a day
• 30.3% - between once a day and once a week
• 5.1 % - less than a month

6. Evidence for
claims
• Claim 3:
Programming-related news aggregators help developers
succeed in their careers
Evidence:
• P8 – The fact that news aggregators filter noisy posts and enable in
reading useful technical information helped him as a developer
• P3,P9,P15,P22 – Tried technologies they have never tried before,
learnt from the experience of previous developers
• P14 – Participation in news aggregators helped him win Microsoft
MVP Title (an MVP is a technological expert who passionately
shares knowledge with the community)
Over all: 52% of respondents agreed that r/programming allows them
to meet experts, ask for help, share stuff and have interesting
discussions.

7. Ideas for
software
project
managers
• New and improved aggregators and tools will help
developers adopt to new technologies quickly.
• Building communities is an important step towards
software sustainability
• Well supported communities help software become a viable
product rather than just a project