Webification of software development: User feedback for developer’s modeling

Abstract

In this paper we present an approach to leveraging experience from rapidly evolving field of information processing on the Web for software development. We consider a web of software artifacts (components) as an information space. Supporting any task in such environment of interconnected artifacts depends on our knowledge on user preferences and his characteristics. We envision the concept of collaborative software development to improve software quality and development efficiency by using both implicit and explicit user (software developer) feedback. It opens a space for using approaches originally devised for the Web. The core of our approach is based on our developed platform for independent code monitoring where we create a dataset of developers’ implicit and explicit feedback based on monitoring developers’ behavior. Employing this platform we acquire, generate and process descriptive metadata that indirectly refer source code artifacts, project documentations and developers activities via document models and user models. As an example of our concept we present an approach for estimation of student’s expertise in a programming course.