# Supporting Software Engineering Research and Education by Annotating Public Videos of Developers Programming

## TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of using publicly available programming videos of developers to enhance software engineering research and education through annotation and analysis.

## Contribution

It proposes creating a centralized repository of programming videos with annotations to study developer behaviors and improve understanding in software engineering.

## Key findings

- Identifies the value of developer videos for research and education
- Suggests methods for annotating and analyzing programming videos
- Highlights open questions for implementing a video repository

## Abstract

Software engineering has long studied how software developers work, building a body of work which forms the foundation of many software engineering best practices, tools, and theories. Recently, some developers have begun recording videos of themselves engaged in programming tasks contributing to open source projects, enabling them to share knowledge and socialize with other developers. We believe that these videos offer an important opportunity for both software engineering research and education. In this paper, we discuss the potential use of these videos as well as open questions for how to best enable this envisioned use. We propose creating a central repository of programming videos, enabling analyzing and annotating videos to illustrate specific behaviors of interest such as asking and answering questions, employing strategies, and software engineering theories. Such a repository would offer an important new way in which both software engineering researchers and students can understand how software developers work.