On-Demand Collaboration in Programming

Yan Chen, University, My
2021
In programming, on-demand assistance occurs when developers seek support for their tasks as needed. Traditionally, this collaboration happens within teams and organizations in which people are familiar with the context of requests and tasks. More recently, this type of collaboration has become ubiquitous outside of teams and organizations, due to the success of paid online crowdsourcing marketplaces (e.g., Upwork) and free online question-answering websites (e.g., Stack Overflow). Thousands of
more » ... equests are posted on these platforms on a daily basis, and many of them are not addressed in a timely manner for a variety of reasons, including requests that often lack sufficient context and access to relevant artifacts. In consequence, on-demand collaboration often results in suboptimal productivity and unsatisfactory user experiences. This dissertation includes three main parts: First, I explored the challenges developers face when requesting help from or providing assistance to others on demand. I have found seven common types of requests (e.g., seeking code examples) that developers use in various projects when an on-demand agent is available. Compared to studying existing supporting systems, I suggest eight key system features to enable more effective on-demand remote assistance for developers. Second, driven by these findings, I designed and developed two systems: 1) CodeOn, a system that enables more effective task hand-offs (e.g., rich context capturing) between end-user developers and remote helpers than exciting synchronous support systems by allowing asynchronous responses to on-demand requests; and 2) CoCapture, a system that enables interface designers to easily create and then accurately describe UI behavior mockups, including changes they want to propose or questions they want to ask about an aspect of the existing UI. Third, beyond software development assistance, I also studied intelligent assistance for embedded system development (e.g., Arduino) and revealed six challenges (e.g., communication setup r [...]
doi:10.7302/67 fatcat:ky3yaqlcfzclzney773vqtjjzu