Software engineering at the speed of light: how developers stay current using twitter

The microblogging service Twitter has over 500 million users posting over 500 million tweets daily. Research has established that software developers use Twitter in their work, but this has not yet been examined in detail. Twitter is an important medium in some software engineering circles—understanding its use could lead to improved support, and learning more about the reasons for non-adoption could inform the design of improved tools. In a qualitative study, we surveyed 271 and interviewed 27 developers active on GitHub. We find that Twitter helps them keep up with the fast-paced development landscape. They use it to stay aware of industry changes, for learning, and for building relationships. We discover the challenges they experience and extract their coping strategies. Some developers do not want to or cannot embrace Twitter for their work—we show their reasons and alternative channels. We validate our findings in a follow-up survey with more than 1,200 respondents.

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