Knowledge management plays a central role in many software development organisations. While much of the important technical knowledge can be captured in software artefacts, there often exists a gap between the information needs of software developers and the structure of this information in a repository. To help developers access information in their repositories more effectively, we are developing approaches to analyse and repackage these artefacts into formats that are more amenable to their readers. This talk will highlight several such approaches that we have developed and evaluated to support the various stakeholders in a software engineering project, including a task-based search interface for software documentation, a code snippet content assist to import code fragments from Stack Overflow, a machine learning approach to augment API documentation with "insight sentences", and a portal designed to help project newcomers. Our work suggests that while much of the knowledge needed by software developers is already available somewhere in a repository, much work is needed to get it to developers in the right format when and where they need it.

Bio

Dr. Christoph Treude is an ARC DECRA Fellow and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada, in 2012 and received his Diplom degree from the University of Siegen, Germany, in 2007. The goal of his research is to advance collaborative software engineering through empirical studies and the innovation of processes and tools that explicitly take the wide variety of artefacts available in a software repository into account.