Personalized developer navigation in software projects aiming at comprehensibility improvement and faster project onboarding

Abstract

Software projects nowadays are getting more sophisticated by utilizing the new technology and the increased hardware power to meet all client requirements. New tools and frameworks keep coming up very frequently, generating many new opportunities and roles which are tempting, for the majority of the developers and this leads to high turnover rates. The turnover effect, the intensive complexity, and the huge variety of new tools are combined the main reasons for which the comprehensibility deteriorates. Low levels of comprehensibility imply more time for a new joiner to become productive which in turn is translated to cost. Due to high turnover rates such costs are massive and apart from delays and costs, many projects even fail. Comprehensibility, however, is not dependent only on the project itself. Soft Skills are very important in order to be able to grasp a project faster. Comprehensibility has been studied a lot as the issue was identified many years ago and it affects not only the Corporate section but also the open-source community, as contributing requires a lot of time as there is none you could directly talk to help you onboard to the project. A survey was conducted among 81 developers and students in order to spot code reading challenges and collect any best practices. Combining the survey results with the literature review, a plugin was developed in order to assist developers to onboard to new projects as the clearest result from the Survey, was that everyone prefers the one-to-one direct meeting to onboard them on a project and CodeTour plugin that was developed in that context, could enhance this onboarding experience by providing an interactive way to onboard, without relying on anyone else.