REACT: An Approach for Capturing Rationale in Chat Messages

Developers' chat messages are a rich source of rationale behind development decisions. Rationale comprises valuable knowledge during software evolution for understanding and maintaining the software system. However, developers resist explicit methods for rationale capturing in practice, due to their intrusiveness and cognitive overhead. Aim: Our primary goal is to help developers capture rationale in chat messages with low effort. Further, we seek to encourage the collaborative capturing of rationale in development teams. Method: In this paper, we present REACT, a lightweight approach for annotating chat messages that contain rationale. To evaluate the feasibility of REACT, we conducted two studies. In the first study, we evaluated the approach with eleven development teams during a short-term design task. In the second study, we evaluated the approach with one development team over a duration of two months. In addition, we distributed a questionnaire to both studies' participants. Results: Our results show that REACT is easily learned and used by developers. Furthermore, it encourages the collaborative capturing of rationale. Remarkably, the majority of participants do not perceive privacy as a barrier when capturing rationale from their informal communication. Conclusions: REACT is a first step towards enhancing rationale capturing in developers' chat messages.