3,820 research outputs found
Gendered behavior as a disadvantage in open source software development
Women are severely marginalized in software development, especially in open
source. In this article we argue that disadvantage is more due to gendered
behavior than to categorical discrimination: women are at a disadvantage
because of what they do, rather than because of who they are. Using data on
entire careers of users from GitHub.com, we develop a measure to capture the
gendered pattern of behavior: We use a random forest prediction of being female
(as opposed to being male) by behavioral choices in the level of activity,
specialization in programming languages, and choice of partners. We test
differences in success and survival along both categorical gender and the
gendered pattern of behavior. We find that 84.5% of women's disadvantage
(compared to men) in success and 34.8% of their disadvantage in survival are
due to the female pattern of their behavior. Men are also disadvantaged along
their interquartile range of the female pattern of their behavior, and users
who don't reveal their gender suffer an even more drastic disadvantage in
survival probability. Moreover, we do not see evidence for any reduction of
these inequalities in time. Our findings are robust to noise in gender
recognition, and to taking into account particular programming languages, or
decision tree classes of gendered behavior. Our results suggest that fighting
categorical gender discrimination will have a limited impact on gender
inequalities in open source software development, and that gender hiding is not
a viable strategy for women
Providing behaviour awareness in collaborative project courses
Several studies show that awareness mechanisms can contribute to enhance the collaboration process among students and the learning experiences during collaborative project courses. However, it is not clear what awareness information should be provided to whom, when it should be provided, and how to obtain and represent such information in an accurate and understandable way. Regardless the research efforts done in this area, the problem remains open. By recognizing the diversity of work scenarios (contexts) where the collaboration may occur, this research proposes a behaviour awareness mechanism to support collaborative work in undergraduate project courses. Based on the authors previous experiences and the literature in the area, the proposed mechanism considers personal and social awareness components, which represent metrics in a visual way, helping students realize their performance, and lecturers intervene when needed. The trustworthiness of the mechanisms for determining the metrics was verified using empirical data, and the usability and usefulness of these metrics were evaluated with undergraduate students. Experimental results show that this awareness mechanism is useful, understandable and representative of the observed scenarios.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Providing behaviour awareness in collaborative project courses
Several studies show that awareness mechanisms can contribute to enhance the collaboration process among students and the learning experiences during collaborative project courses. However, it is not clear what awareness information should be provided to whom, when it should be provided, and how to obtain and represent such information in an accurate and understandable way. Regardless the research efforts done in this area, the problem remains open. By recognizing the diversity of work scenarios (contexts) where the collaboration may occur, this research proposes a behaviour awareness mechanism to support collaborative work in undergraduate project courses. Based on the authors previous experiences and the literature in the area, the proposed mechanism considers personal and social awareness components, which represent metrics in a visual way, helping students realize their performance, and lecturers intervene when needed. The trustworthiness of the mechanisms for determining the metrics was verified using empirical data, and the usability and usefulness of these metrics were evaluated with undergraduate students. Experimental results show that this awareness mechanism is useful, understandable and representative of the observed scenarios.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Poster: Communication in Open-Source Projects--End of the E-mail Era?
Communication is essential in software engineering. Especially in distributed
open-source teams, communication needs to be supported by channels including
mailing lists, forums, issue trackers, and chat systems. Yet, we do not have a
clear understanding of which communication channels stakeholders in open-source
projects use. In this study, we fill the knowledge gap by investigating a
statistically representative sample of 400 GitHub projects. We discover the
used communication channels by regular expressions on project data. We show
that (1) half of the GitHub projects use observable communication channels; (2)
GitHub Issues, e-mail addresses, and the modern chat system Gitter are the most
common channels; (3) mailing lists are only in place five and have a lower
market share than all modern chat systems combined.Comment: 2 pages. To appear as a poster in 40th International Conference on
Software Engineering (ICSE 2018) Companion proceeding
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