Pragmatic software reuse in bioinformatics: How can social network information help?

Abstract

Little is known about the specific kinds of questions that bioinformatics programmers ask during pragmatic software reuse tasks and how well development online social networks help answer those questions. To fill the gap, we report an empirical study involving 20 biomedical software developers performing reuse tasks. A key contribution of our study is the discovery of 31 questions needed to be addressed, which we further classify into 5 categories along a software-architecture-centric and problem-domain-centric spectrum. Our study further provides evidence for the positive effect of social network information on pragmatic reuse tasks. Our work can lead to enhanced tool support so as to improve biomedical software reuse in practice.