Summarizing software engineering communication artifacts from different sources

Abstract

During software development, developers communicate a lot and with many different people. Communication is an important factor, to the point that communication failures are seen as the causes of productivity losses or even project failures. To communicate with each other, software developers use many different tools like mailing lists, forums, issue trackers or chats. Even in a short time span, a lot of information artifacts can arise through these channels, which can be very time consuming to get through after a long vacation or for new members of the team. This paper describes a research plan for an approach which can summarize different communication sources into one big summary using and improving existing text summarization approaches. The resulting tool would have the potential to decrease the effort needed for sense-making and comprehension of communication, as well as the time needed for locating and using information from the communication sources. This reduction in effort will result in a significant increase in the productivity of software development companies.