3,400 research outputs found

    Consequences of Unhappiness While Developing Software

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    The growing literature on affect among software developers mostly reports on the linkage between happiness, software quality, and developer productivity. Understanding the positive side of happiness -- positive emotions and moods -- is an attractive and important endeavor. Scholars in industrial and organizational psychology have suggested that also studying the negative side -- unhappiness -- could lead to cost-effective ways of enhancing working conditions, job performance, and to limiting the occurrence of psychological disorders. Our comprehension of the consequences of (un)happiness among developers is still too shallow, and is mainly expressed in terms of development productivity and software quality. In this paper, we attempt to uncover the experienced consequences of unhappiness among software developers. Using qualitative data analysis of the responses given by 181 questionnaire participants, we identified 49 consequences of unhappiness while doing software development. We found detrimental consequences on developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts. Our classification scheme, available as open data, will spawn new happiness research opportunities of cause-effect type, and it can act as a guideline for practitioners for identifying damaging effects of unhappiness and for fostering happiness on the job.Comment: 6 pages. To be presented at the Second International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering, colocated with the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'17). Extended version of arXiv:1701.02952v2 [cs.SE

    Worse Than Spam: Issues In Sampling Software Developers

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    Background: Reaching out to professional software developers is a crucial part of empirical software engineering research. One important method to investigate the state of practice is survey research. As drawing a random sample of professional software developers for a survey is rarely possible, researchers rely on various sampling strategies. Objective: In this paper, we report on our experience with different sampling strategies we employed, highlight ethical issues, and motivate the need to maintain a collection of key demographics about software developers to ease the assessment of the external validity of studies. Method: Our report is based on data from two studies we conducted in the past. Results: Contacting developers over public media proved to be the most effective and efficient sampling strategy. However, we not only describe the perspective of researchers who are interested in reaching goals like a large number of participants or a high response rate, but we also shed light onto ethical implications of different sampling strategies. We present one specific ethical guideline and point to debates in other research communities to start a discussion in the software engineering research community about which sampling strategies should be considered ethical.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the 2016 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2016), ACM, 201

    How diverse is your team? Investigating gender and nationality diversity in GitHub teams

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    Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Background Building an effective team of developers is a complex task faced by both software companies and open source communities. The problem of forming a “dream” team involves many variables, including consideration of human factors and it is not a dilemma solvable in a mathematical way. Empirical studies might provide interesting insights to explain which factors need to be taken into account in building a team of developers and which levers act to optimise productivity among developers. Aim In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study aimed at investigating the link between team diversity (i.e., gender, nationality) and productivity (issue fixing time). Method We consider issues solved from the GHTorrent dataset inferring gender and nationality of each team’s members. We also evaluate the politeness of all comments involved in issue resolution. Results Results show that higher gender diversity is linked with a lower team average issue fixing time (higher productivity), that nationality diversity is linked with lower team politeness and that gender diversity is linked with higher sentiment.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

    Gender Differences in Personality Traits of Software Engineers

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    There is a growing body of gender studies in software engineering to understand diversity and inclusion issues, as diversity is recognized to be a key issue to healthy teams and communities. A second factor often linked to team performance is personality, which has received far more attention. Very few studies, however, have focused on the intersection of these two fields. Hence, we set out to study gender differences in personality traits of software engineers. Through a survey study we collected personality data, using the HEXACO model, of 483 software engineers. The data were analyzed using a Bayesian independent sample t-test and network analysis. The results suggest that women score significantly higher in Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility, and Emotionality than men. Further, men show higher psychopathic traits than women. Based on these findings, we develop a number of propositions that can guide future research

    The Impacts of Lockdown on Open Source Software Contributions during the COVID-19 Outbreak

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    We leverage the lockdown of Wuhan, China in January 2020 in response to COVID-19 as a natural experiment to study its impacts on individuals’ contributions to open source software (OSS) on GitHub – the world’s largest OSS platform. We find that Wuhan developers’ contributions decreased by 10.2% relative to those in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan (HMT) regions in the five weeks after the lockdown. Moreover, the contributions of Wuhan developers who interacted more with local developers on GitHub were reduced more after the lockdown. We conjecture that the lack of face-to-face (F2F) collaboration for Wuhan developers is the main driver of their reduced contributions, providing important insights for OSS platforms and stakeholders

    Including Everyone, Everywhere:Understanding Opportunities and Challenges of Geographic Gender-Inclusion in OSS

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    The gender gap is a significant concern facing the software industry as the development becomes more geographically distributed. Widely shared reports indicate that gender differences may be specific to each region. However, how complete can these reports be with little to no research reflective of the Open Source Software (OSS) process and communities software is now commonly developed in? Our study presents a multi-region geographical analysis of gender inclusion on GitHub. This mixed-methods approach includes quantitatively investigating differences in gender inclusion in projects across geographic regions and investigate these trends over time using data from contributions to 21,456 project repositories. We also qualitatively understand the unique experiences of developers contributing to these projects through a survey that is strategically targeted to developers in various regions worldwide. Our findings indicate that gender diversity is low across all parts of the world, with no substantial difference across regions. However, there has been statistically significant improvement in diversity worldwide since 2014, with certain regions such as Africa improving at faster pace. We also find that most motivations and barriers to contributions (e.g., lack of resources to contribute and poor working environment) were shared across regions, however, some insightful differences, such as how to make projects more inclusive, did arise. From these findings, we derive and present implications for tools that can foster inclusion in open source software communities and empower contributions from everyone, everywhere
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