Date of Award

8-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

Committee Chair/Advisor

Paige Rodeghero

Committee Member

Carlos Toxtli Hernandez

Committee Member

Feng Luo

Committee Member

Igor Steinmacher

Abstract

Software development teams add newcomers to accommodate the increasing demand, complexity of software solutions, and turnover. Onboarding newcomers is expensive and error-prone. It can take up to three years for a newcomer to become an expert on a project. Onboarding techniques described in the current literature focus on collocated teams. As more teams are adopting remote and distributed team structures, I address this research gap in understanding remote onboarding for software developers. I present my research on the use of Virtual Reality (VR) for remote software developer onboarding. I discuss a VR remote pair programming environment. With positive outcomes, pair programming has been used in software developer onboarding. I compare the use of VR and traditional teleconferencing for pair programming. Through this research, I demonstrate the benefits of using VR for remote pair programming. Next, I present my research investigating the use of VR for source code comprehension. Then, I present a chatbot that guides newcomers when onboarding to a new software development team. It is imperative to understand the questions that newcomers ask when joining a new project, for such a chatbot to be successful. I present a dataset of all newcomer GitHub issue comments made on GitHub in 2021. I developed a code book to label newcomer comments. I found that the most frequently made newcomer comment is 'newcomer assignment request'. With this understanding, I aim to assist GitHub maintainers while they respond to newcomer issue comments. I designed and developed a dashboard. The dashboard displays newcomer issue comments labeled using the classification benchmarks developed on top of the GitHub issue comments dataset. I present the results of a maintainer evaluation of the dashboard where maintainers found the labels helpful while drafting responses to newcomer issue comments. In order to further assist GitHub maintainers, I developed a dialogue auto-generator that accepts the issue title and turn-by-turn dialogue as context to then generate responses to the newcomer issue comment. Overall, this dissertation addresses this research gap in understanding remote onboarding for software developers and offers practical tools to support GitHub maintainers in this process.

Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0002-4805-6762

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