Context-Augmented Software Development Projects: Literature Review and Preliminary Framework

TL;DR

This paper reviews existing research on the role of context in software development, aiming to make contextual knowledge explicit and proposing a platform to enhance development productivity through context-aware support.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive literature review on software development context and introduces a preliminary framework and platform to utilize contextual knowledge for improved development processes.

Findings

Context is crucial but often implicit in software development.

Explicit representation of context can improve knowledge reuse.

Proposed platform aims to support real-time context-aware recommendations.

Abstract

Software development is a complex activity which depends on diverse technologies and people's expertise. The approaches to developing software highly depend on these different characteristics, which are the context developers are subject to. This context contains massive knowledge, and not capturing it means knowledge is continuously lost. Although extensively researched, context in software development is still not explicit, nor proposed into a broader view of the context needed by software developers and tools. Therefore, developers' productivity is affected, as the ability to reuse this rich context is hampered. This paper proposes a literature review on context for software development, through nine research questions. The purpose of this study is making the discovered context explicit into an integrated view and proposing a platform to aid software development using context information. We believe supporting contextual knowledge through its representation and mining for recommendation and real-time provision can significantly improve big data software project development.