A qualitative analysis of themes in instant messaging communication of software developers

Software developers use instant messaging (e.g., Slack, Gitter) to collaboratively discuss software engineering problems and solutions. This communication takes place in chat rooms that generally contain a description of the main topic of discussion and the messages exchanged. To analyze whether and how the knowledge accumulated in these chat rooms is relevant to other developers, we first need to understand the themes discussed in these chat rooms. In this paper, we used thematic analysis to manually identify software engineering themes in the description of 87 chat rooms of Gitter, an instant messaging tool for software developers. Then, we checked whether these themes also occur in 184 public chat rooms of Slack, another instant messaging tool. We identified 47 themes in Gitter chat rooms, and regarding the applicability of themes, we could relate 36 of our themes to 173 Slack chat rooms. Our results indicate that, in the context of our study, chat rooms in developer instant messaging communication are mostly about software development technologies and practices rather than development processes. Furthermore, most chat rooms are topic- rather than project-related (e.g., a chat room used by developers of a particular software development project).