Predicting most productive requirements elicitation teams using MBTI personality traits model

The social and collaborative nature of requirements elicitation process bases its core dependency on aptitude, attitudes, and personality characteristics of its participants. The participant's personality characteristics are directly related with their personality traits, which can be categorized using different model has been used successfully for the assessments of personality of software engineers since last few decades. In this article, the personality traits for requirements elicitation teams have been predicted using MBTI personality assessments model, on the basis of their industry demands job descriptions/tasks and major soft skills. The article presents a complete personality prediction process using a systematic approach based on major soft skills mapping with job descriptions, personality attributes and personality. The obtained results show that extroversion and feelings personality traits are the most suitable assigned the task of requirements elicitation. The obtained results are very much aligned with the already published scholar's work for software engineer's personality assessments and development team composition

An Empirical Investigation of Pull Requests in Partially Distributed BizDevOps Teams

In globally distributed projects, virtual teams are often partially dispersed. One common setup occurs when several members from one company work with a large outsourcing vendor based in another country. Further, the introduction of the popular BizDevOps concept has increased the necessity to cooperate across departments and reduce the age-old disconnection between the business strategy and technical development. Establishing a good collaboration in partially distributed BizDevOps teams requires extensive collaboration and communication techniques. Nowadays, a common approach is to rely on collaboration through pull requests and frequent communication on Slack. To investigate barriers for pull requests in distributed teams, we examined an organization located in Scandinavia where cross-functional BizDevOps teams collaborated with off-site team members in India. Data were collected by conducting 14 interviews, observing 23 entire days with the team, and observing 37 meetings. We found that the pull-request approach worked very well locally but not across sites. We found barriers such as domain complexity, different agile processes (timeboxed vs. flow-based development), and employee turnover. Using an intellectual capital lens on our findings, we discuss barriers and positive and negative effects on the success of the pull-request approach

Code quality in pull requests: an empirical study

Pull requests are a common practice for contributing and reviewing contributions, and are employed both in open-source and industrial contexts. Compared to the traditional code review process adopted in the 1970s and 1980s, pull requests allow a more lightweight reviewing approach. One of the main goals of code reviews is to find defects in the code, allowing project maintainers to easily integrate external contributions into a project and discuss the code contributions. The goal of this work is to understand whether code quality is actually considered when pull requests are accepted. Specifically, we aim at understanding whether code quality issues such as code smells, antipatterns, and coding style violations in the pull request code affect the chance of its acceptance when reviewed by a maintainer of the project. We conducted a case study among 28 Java open-source projects, analyzing the presence of 4.7 M code quality issues in 36 K pull requests. We analyzed further correlations by applying Logistic Regression and seven machine learning techniques (Decision Tree, Random Forest, Extremely Randomized Trees, AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting, XGBoost). Unexpectedly, code quality turned out not to affect the acceptance of a pull request at all. As suggested by other works, other factors such as the reputation of the maintainer and the importance of the feature delivered might be more important than code quality in terms of pull request acceptance

An Analysis of Human Aspects of Collaborative Group Members in OSS development

Open Source Software development is a collective activity that involves different software developers who may differ from each other. Although, previous researchers have focused on technical aspects like code factors, technology used etc, recently researchers have explored non-technical human aspects like personality, ethnicity and gender to measure various outcomes. This research assists the emerging state-of-the-art body on diversity research with an empirical study that analyzes how the personality and, the race and ethnic diversity of members in a collaborative group relates to their collaborative contributions in Open Source Software(OSS) development. This research contains two parts - In the first part we analyse the collaborative group members’ personalities and frequency of their collaborative contributions. In the second part we analyse the relationship between the diversity of collaborative group members’ race and ethnicity, and the frequency of their collaborative contributions in GitHub. We infer collaborative groups within a project based on the collaboration between software developers in that project. Since previous studies have shown pull requests as the major contribution for a developer to be accepted as a group member, we measure the collabora- tive contributions of the group members by the number of pull request the group members have merged collaboratively. Our results from the first part of our research, indicate that 1) the personality traits of collaborative group members does have a relationship with the frequency of their collab- orative contributions. Specifically, the more conscientious and less extroverted the group members are, the more contributions that the group members merged. Furthermore, 2) groups that are more diverse with respect to Conscientiousness or Neuroticism have a negative relationship with the frequency of their collaborative contributions. Finally, 3) collaborative groups that are having a majority of highly open, conscientious, or neurotic developers have a positive relationship with their collaborative contributions as well. Also, from the second part of our research, We observe that (1) a major part of the developer population are White developers; (2) homogeneous and heterogeneous collabo- rative groups, with respect to race and ethnicity of their group members, have a different distribution of collaborative contributions, with heterogeneous groups having more num- ber of contributions than homogeneous groups and (3) Diversity of race and ethnicity of members in a collaborative group does have a positive statistically significant relationship with the frequency of collaborative group members’ contributions

A Preliminary Analysis on the Effects of Propensity to Trust in Distributed Software Development

Establishing trust between developers working at distant sites facilitates team collaboration in distributed software development. While previous research has focused on how to build and spread trust in absence of direct, face-to-face communication, it has overlooked the effects of the propensity to trust, i.e., the trait of personality representing the individual disposition to perceive the others as trustworthy. In this study, we present a preliminary, quantitative analysis on how the propensity to trust affects the success of collaborations in a distributed project, where the success is represented by pull requests whose code changes and contributions are successfully merged into the project's repository