Crowdsourced Software Development and Maintenance

As modern software systems are becoming increasingly complex, developers often need to rely on online sources to address problems encountered during software development and maintenance. These resources provide developers with access to peers' expertise, covering knowledge of different software lifecycle phases, including design, implementation, and maintenance. However, exploiting such knowledge and converting it into actionable items is far from trivial, due to the vastness of the information available online as well as to its unstructured nature. In this research, we aim at (partially) crowdsourcing the software design, implementation and maintenance process by exploiting the knowledge embedded in various sources available on the Web (e.g., Stack Overflow discussions, presentations on SlideShare, open source code, etc.). For example, we want to support software design decisions (e.g., whether to use a specific library for the implementation of a feature) by performing opinion mining on the vast amount of information available on the Web, and we want to recommend refactoring operations by learning from the code written in open source systems. The final goal is to improve developers' productivity and code quality.