Exploring the Use of Chatrooms by Developers: An Empirical Study on Slack and Gitter

Communication is critical for the software development teams to maintain project awareness, facilitate project co-ordination and avoid misunderstandings. The features offered in the chatrooms, such as private messaging, group conversations, and code sharing help accommodate the communication needs of the software development teams. Therefore, chatrooms have been increasingly adopted among the developers. Since the last study on Slack performed by (Lin et al. 2016), the audience of Slack has more than doubled possibly leading to an evolution of the ways Slack is used; while another rich community formed around Gitter and remains unstudied. In this paper, we perform an investigative study using qualitative and quantitative techniques to gain insights on the use of popular modern chatrooms, specifically Slack and Gitter. Based on the survey responses from 163 developers, the interviews with 21 developers, and the chatroom data collected from 11 Slack and 770 Gitter rooms, we are able to uncover the reasons behind the use of Slack and Gitter, the perceived impact on the associated projects, and the quality determinants of the two chatrooms. We find that the developers seek knowledge from the chatrooms to obtain timely feedback from experts, and in return share their expertise to build the project community and their reputations. Furthermore, it is perceived by the Gitter developers that the chatrooms have an impact on prioritizing the new features and the bug fixes. In Slack, the most reported impact concerns an increased project awareness, in terms of a better tracking of the work progress. As reported on the developers’ survey, both Slack and Gitter chat services have a visible impact on mentoring developers, and sharing the best practices. In terms of quality determinants, a non-ephemeral history and a better history management (e.g., advanced search) could be keys for both chat services to reach their full potential.