Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne D. Storey. Bridging lightweight and heavyweight task organization: the role of tags in adopting new task categories. In Jeff Kramer, Judith Bishop, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Sebastián Uchitel, editors, Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2, ICSE 2010, Cape Town, South Africa, 1-8 May 2010. pages 231-234, ACM, 2010. [doi]
In collaborative software development projects, tasks are often used as a mechanism to coordinate and track shared development work. Modern development environments provide explicit support for task management where tasks are typically organized and managed through predefined categories. Although there have been many studies that analyze data available from task management systems, there has been relatively little work on the design of task management tools. In this paper we explore how tagging with freely assigned keywords provides developers with a lightweight mechanism to further categorize and annotate development tasks. We investigate how tags that are frequently used over a long period of time reveal the need for additional predefined categories of keywords in task management tool support. Finally, we suggest future work to explore how integrated lightweight tool features in a development environment may improve software development practices.