Why Developers Are Slacking Off: Understanding How Software Teams Use Slack

Slack is a modern communication platform for teams that is seeing wide and rapid adoption by software develop-ment teams. Slack not only facilitates team messaging and archiving, but it also supports a wide plethora of inte-grations to external services and bots. We have found that Slack and its integrations (i.e., bots) are playing an increas-ingly significant role in software development, replacing email in some cases and disrupting software development processes. To understand how Slack impacts development team dynamics, we designed an exploratory study to inves-tigate how developers use Slack and how they benefit from it. We find that developers use Slack for personal, team-wide and community-wide purposes. Our research also reveals that developers use and create diverse integrations (called bots) to support their work. This study serves as the first step towards understanding the role of Slack in sup-porting software engineering.