What design topics do developers discuss?
Giovanni Viviani, Calahan Janik-Jones, Michalis Famelis, Xin Xia, Gail C. Murphy · 2018
When contributing code to a software system, developers are often confronted with the hard task of understanding and adhering to the system's design. This task is often made more difficult by the lack of explicit design information. Often, recorded design information occurs only embedded in discussions between developers. If this design information could be identified automatically and put into a form useful to developers, many development tasks could be eased, such as directing questions that arise during code review, tracking design changes that might affect desired system qualities, and helping developers understand why the code is as it is. In this paper, we take an initial step towards this goal, considering how design information appears in pull request discussions and manually categorizing 275 paragraphs from those discussions that contain design information to learn about what kinds of design topics are discussed.