Dissertation Published

On February 11 2013, I defended my PhD thesis with the title “Improving the Adoption of Software Engineering Practices Through Persuasive Interventions”. Thanks a lot to Felienne who live-blogged my defense talk and the questioning by the committee.

Due to German regulations, having defended my thesis merely meant that I was no longer obligated to correct someone else calling me a doctor. However, I was not allowed to call myself that until I had published it — again, adhering to some regulations. Due to the power of self-publishing / print-on-demand (I used lulu.com), I obtained several copies of the book and my certificate only 8 days after the defense. Continue reading →

On Testing Culture in GitHub Projects

Previous research suggests that the publicity on GitHub that is making developers’ actions and interactions more visible might have an effect on how software development practices are communicated and how they diffuse in projects.

My colleagues (Raphael Pham, Olga Liskin, Fernando Figueira Filho, Kurt Schneider) and I wondered: which influence does this have on testing practices? Does this create new challenges, and if so, how do developers cope with them? Which strategies do members of GitHub use to create a beneficial testing culture in their projects? To investigate this, we conducted interviews and questionnaires with diverse users of GitHub. Continue reading →

Mutual Assessment in the Social Programmer Ecosystem

Developers use social media sites to communicate, collaborate, connect with each other, and even for competition. These sites and their users create a social programmer ecosystem with dynamics that are the subject of ongoing research.

Recently, websites have appeared that create profiles from developers’ content and activities on other sites — they are developer profile aggregators. Examples are Masterbranch and Coderwall. Among other mechanisms, both services award achievement badges to developers for specific accomplishments — such as being the most active committer in a project, or having a project forked by others.

With colleagues from Brazil and Canada, we studied users of these sites, providing us with a window into the social programmer ecosystem. Continue reading →

A Collection of Notable Git Resources

Whenever a student or colleague asks me about getting started with git, I look up a set of resources I found quite enlightening and / or useful and give them a bunch of links, often with a hand-crafted description of each. To repeat myself less often in the future, I’m now using the power of a blog post that consolidates that material.

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A Zooming Bookmarklet for Comfy Reading

When reading articles on the web, I like to lean back a little. Ideally, one of my cats sleeps on my lap, further complicating reading. I therefore really need fonts and images to be a little larger. To scratch this itch, I created me a bookmarklet that zooms into the page as long as it will still fit the window. This enlargens the text and images as much as possible, while still avoiding a horizontal scrollbar. Perfect for my reading habits.
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