Eye of the Mind: Image Processing for Social Coding

Abstract: Developers are increasingly sharing images in social coding environments alongside the growth in visual interactions within social networks. The analysis of the ratio between the textual and visual content of Mozilla's change requests and in Q/As of StackOverflow programming revealed a steady increase in sharing images over the past five years. Developers' shared images are meaningful and are providing complementary information compared to their associated text. Often, the shared images are essential in understanding the change requests, questions, or the responses submitted. Relying on these observations, we delve into the potential of automatic completion of textual software artifacts with visual content.