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Twitter and evidence-based software engineering

This year’s quest for software engineering data has led me to sign up to Twitter (all the software people I know, or know-of, have been contacted, and discovery through articles found on the Internet is a very slow process).

@evidenceSE is my Twitter handle. If you get into a discussion and want some evidence-based input, feel free to get me involved. Be warned that the most likely response, to many kinds of questions, is that there is no data.

My main reason for joining is to try and obtain software engineering data. Other reasons include trying to introduce an evidence-based approach to software engineering discussions and finding new (to me) problems that people want answers to (that are capable of being answered by analysing data).

The approach I’m taking is to find software engineering tweets discussing a topic for which some data is available, and to jump in with a response relating to this data. Appropriate tweets are found using the search pattern: (agile OR software OR "story points" OR "story point" OR "function points") (estimate OR estimates OR estimating OR estimation OR estimated OR #noestimates OR "evidence based" OR empirical OR evolution OR ecosystems OR cognitive). Suggestions for other keywords or patterns welcome.

My experience is that the only effective way to interact with developers is via meaningful discussion, i.e., cold-calling with a tweet is likely to be unproductive. Also, people with data often don’t think that anybody else would be interested in it, they have to convinced that it can provide valuable insight.

You never know who has data to share. At a minimum, I aim to have a brief tweet discussion with everybody on Twitter involved in software engineering. At a minute per tweet (when I get a lot more proficient than I am now, and have workable templates in place), I could spend two hours per day to reach 100 people, which is 35,000 per year; say 20K by the end of this year. Over the last three days I have managed around 10 per day, and obviously need to improve a lot.

How many developers are on Twitter? Waving arms wildly, say 50 million developers and 1 in 1,000 have a Twitter account, giving 50K developers (of which an unknown percentage are active). A lower bound estimate is the number of followers of popular software related Twitter accounts: CompSciFact has 238K, Unix tool tips has 87K; perhaps 1 in 200 developers have a Twitter account, or some developers have multiple accounts, or there are lots of bots out there.

I need some tools to improve the search process and help track progress and responses. Twitter has an API and a developer program. No need to worry about them blocking me or taking over my business; my usage is small fry and I’ not building a business to take over. I was at Twitter’s London developer meetup in the week (the first in-person event since Covid) and the youngsters present looked a lot younger than usual. I suspect this is because the slightly older youngsters remember how Twitter cut developers off at the knee a few years ago by shutting down some useful API services.

The Twitter version-2 API looks interesting, and the Twitter developer evangelists are keen to attract developers (having ‘wiped out’ many existing API users), and I’m happy to jump in. A Twitter API sandbox for trying things out, and there are lots of example projects on Github. Pointers to interesting tools welcome.

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