Community Smell Detection and Refactoring in SLACK: The CADOCS Project

Abstract

Software engineering is a human-centered activity involving various stakeholders with different backgrounds that have to communicate and collaborate to reach shared objectives. The emergence of conflicts among stakeholders may lead to undesired effects on software maintainability, yet it is often unavoidable in the long run. Community smells, i.e., sub-optimal communication and collaboration practices, have been defined to map recurrent conflicts among developers. While some community smell detection tools have been proposed in the recent past, these can be mainly used for research purposes because of their limited level of usability and user engagement. To facilitate a wider use of community smell-related information by practitioners, we present CADOCS, a client-server conversational agent that builds on top of a previous community smell detection tool proposed by Almarini et al. to (1) make it usable within a well-established communication channel like Slack and (2) augment it by providing initial support to software analytics instruments useful to diagnose and refactor community smells. We describe the features of the tool and the preliminary evaluation conducted to assess and improve robustness and usability.