Marco Aurelio Gerosa

Zixuan Feng, Prashant Tandan, Igor Steinmacher et al.

Onboarding documentation is critical for attracting and retaining newcomers in open source software (OSS). However, it is often presented as dense, inconsistently structured, and fragmented presentations that are difficult to understand, which creates cognitive overload leading to frustration, errors, and abandonment. Here, we investigate how Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML) strategies can be used to restructure OSS documentation. We use a GenAI-based pipeline to operationalize these strategies to restructure OSS documentation through our prototype VisDoc. VisDoc segments documentation into task-based units, infers workflows, removes redundancy, and generates multimodal explanations. An expert evaluation (N=4) affirmed VisDoc's completeness, accuracy, and adoptability; A between-subjects evaluation (N=14) with newcomers found that VisDoc participants achieved higher task success, had significantly lower cognitive load, and perceived higher usability. The contributions of this work include a CTML-grounded analysis of onboarding challenges, a GenAI-based documentation restructuring pipeline, and empirical evidence that cognitively informed documentation restructuring reduces cognitive load and improves usability and task performance in OSS.

Bianca Trinkenreich, Marco Aurelio Gerosa, Anita Sarma et al.

Burnout affects software developers' mental and physical well-being and contributes to turnover, generating strong concerns in the software industry. Prior research has shown that lack of belonging is associated with higher levels of burnout among software developers, while a sense of belonging is linked to resilience, job satisfaction, engagement, and well-being. In this paper, we revisit recent studies on belongingness in software development teams, including proprietary software organizations and open-source software communities, to offer evidence-based guidelines for cultivating belongingness and reducing developer burnout. We summarize characteristics of belongingness, such as trust, acceptance, value recognition, friendship, membership, mutual support, and being known by others, as well as factors associated with belongingness, including recognition, psychological safety, intrinsic motivation, English confidence, tenure, gender, and cultural power distance. Based on these findings, we propose practical guidelines for leaders and communities, including timely and consistent recognition, transparent promotion rules, inclusive benefits and initiatives, intentional connections through collaborative tools, blameless postmortems, optional in-person opportunities, informal newcomer gatherings, and continuous monitoring of belongingness and burnout. These guidelines can help software organizations and open-source communities foster healthier, more inclusive environments that support developer well-being.

Fabio Calefato, Marco Aurelio Gerosa, Giuseppe Iaffaldano et al.

Several Open Source Software (OSS) projects depend on the continuity of their development communities to remain sustainable. Understanding how developers become inactive or why they take breaks can help communities prevent abandonment and incentivize developers to come back. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify developers' inactive periods by analyzing the individual rhythm of contributions to the projects. Using this method, we quantitatively analyze the inactivity of core developers in 18 OSS organizations hosted on GitHub. We also survey core developers to receive their feedback about the identified breaks and transitions. Our results show that our method was effective for identifying developers' breaks. About 94% of the surveyed core developers agreed with our state model of inactivity; 71% and 79% of them acknowledged their breaks and state transition, respectively. We also show that all core developers take breaks (at least once) and about a half of them (~45%}) have completely disengaged from a project for at least one year. We also analyzed the probability of transitions to/from inactivity and found that developers who pause their activity have a ~35-55\% chance to return to an active state; yet, if the break lasts for a year or longer, then the probability of resuming activities drops to ~21-26%, with a ~54% chance of complete disengagement. These results may support the creation of policies and mechanisms to make OSS community managers aware of breaks and potential project abandonment.

Ana Paula Chaves, Marco Aurelio Gerosa

This position paper discusses the relevance of register as a theoretical framework for chatbot language design. We present the concept of register and discuss how using register-specific language influence the user's perceptions of the interaction with chatbots. Additionally, we point several research opportunities that are important to pursue to establish register as a foundation for advancing chatbot's communication skills.

Ana Paula Chaves, Jesse Egbert, Toby Hocking et al.

Chatbots are often designed to mimic social roles attributed to humans. However, little is known about the impact on user's perceptions of using language that fails to conform to the associated social role. Our research draws on sociolinguistic theory to investigate how a chatbot's language choices can adhere to the expected social role the agent performs within a given context. In doing so, we seek to understand whether chatbots design should account for linguistic register. This research analyzes how register differences play a role in shaping the user's perception of the human-chatbot interaction. Ultimately, we want to determine whether register-specific language influences users' perceptions and experiences with chatbots. We produced parallel corpora of conversations in the tourism domain with similar content and varying register characteristics and evaluated users' preferences of chatbot's linguistic choices in terms of appropriateness, credibility, and user experience. Our results show that register characteristics are strong predictors of user's preferences, which points to the needs of designing chatbots with register-appropriate language to improve acceptance and users' perceptions of chatbot interactions.

Raula Gaikovina Kula, Christoph Treude, Hideaki Hata et al.

Software plays a central role in modern societies, with its high economic value and potential for advancing societal change. In this paper, we characterise challenges and opportunities for a country progressing towards entering the global software industry, focusing on Papua New Guinea (PNG). By hosting a Software Engineering workshop, we conducted a qualitative study by recording talks (n=3), employing a questionnaire (n=52), and administering an in-depth focus group session with local actors (n=5). Based on a thematic analysis, we identified challenges as barriers and opportunities for the PNG software engineering community. We also discuss the state of practices and how to make it inclusive for practitioners, researchers, and educators from both the local and global software engineering community.

Ana Paula Chaves, Marco Aurelio Gerosa

Chatbots' growing popularity has brought new challenges to HCI, having changed the patterns of human interactions with computers. The increasing need to approximate conversational interaction styles raises expectations for chatbots to present social behaviors that are habitual in human-human communication. In this survey, we argue that chatbots should be enriched with social characteristics that cohere with users' expectations, ultimately avoiding frustration and dissatisfaction. We bring together the literature on disembodied, text-based chatbots to derive a conceptual model of social characteristics for chatbots. We analyzed 56 papers from various domains to understand how social characteristics can benefit human-chatbot interactions and identify the challenges and strategies to designing them. Additionally, we discussed how characteristics may influence one another. Our results provide relevant opportunities to both researchers and designers to advance human-chatbot interactions.

Eduardo Felipe Zambom Santana, Ana Paula Chaves, Marco Aurelio Gerosa et al.

Making cities smarter help improve city services and increase citizens' quality of life. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are fundamental for progressing towards smarter city environments. Smart City software platforms potentially support the development and integration of Smart City applications. However, the ICT community must overcome current significant technological and scientific challenges before these platforms can be widely used. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in software platforms for Smart Cities. We analyzed 23 projects with respect to the most used enabling technologies, as well as functional and non-functional requirements, classifying them into four categories: Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Things, Big Data, and Cloud Computing. Based on these results, we derived a reference architecture to guide the development of next-generation software platforms for Smart Cities. Finally, we enumerated the most frequently cited open research challenges, and discussed future opportunities. This survey gives important references for helping application developers, city managers, system operators, end-users, and Smart City researchers to make project, investment, and research decisions.