How Software Developers Mitigate Collaboration Friction with Chatbots
This addresses collaboration challenges for software developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing socio-technical models without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackled the problem of collaboration friction in software development by exploring how chatbots can help reduce friction points, identifying three main areas of conflict: team interactions, individual interactions with technology, and team interactions with technology, and providing open questions for discussion.
Modern software developers rely on an extensive set of social media tools and communication channels. The adoption of team communication platforms has led to the emergence of conversation-based tools and integrations, many of which are chatbots. Understanding how software developers manage their complex constellation of collaborators in conjunction with the practices and tools they use can bring valuable insights into socio-technical collaborative work in software development and other knowledge work domains. In this paper, we explore how chatbots can help reduce the friction points software developers face when working collaboratively. Using a socio-technical model for collaborative work, we identify three main areas for conflict: friction stemming from team interactions with each other, an individual's interactions with technology, and team interactions with technology. Finally, we provide a set of open questions for discussion within the research community.