What Do Developers Want? An Advisor Approach for Developer Priorities

On a typical work day, a software developer is swamped to know answers to a multitude of questions to gain diverse insights into the project environment, spanning multiple categories including code, quality and guidance. Due to client mandates, the project environment employs a lot of heterogeneous tools, thus making the relevant information retrieval process fairly complex and therefore it is important to know which insights are most important to the developer. In this paper, we present results from a survey we conducted on a pool of 27 developers from the development team in the delivery center, by asking them to rate a set of 25 Questions, prioritising them as most, moderate and least important to be answered automatically during the software evolution process. We also introduce the concept of Smart Advisor for developers, an intelligence augmentation framework that employs domain and knowledge modelling and in-process analytics to automatically provide important insights and answer developer queries, using a conversational and interactive user interface.