Investigating Cultural Dimensions via Developers Artefacts: The Utility of Repository Mining

A growing body of research is using artefacts from online development communities to explore the impact of developers’ behaviours on the software development process. Although this research has produced many insights, researchers have yet to fully explore the impact of developers’ cultural backgrounds on their behaviours in an online community, although such understandings could be useful for helping the community to understand and plan for team dynamics. This study utilised a pragmatic case study to explore the relationship between culture and online behaviour among developers from the United States (U.S.), China, and Russia—three countries that differ in their orientations as individualistic or collectivist cultures. The data for the study comprised artefacts supplied over an 11-year period by users of Stack Overflow1, a popular online programming community that addresses questions from members by providing them with rapid access to the knowledge and expertise of their peers. Artefacts consisted of developers’ questions and answers, personal profiles, Up and Down voting records, online reputations, and earned badges. Data mining techniques, as well as statistical, linguistic, and content analysis were used to compare artefacts from the three groups of developers based on their cultural orientation as individualistic or collectivistic, attitudes, and interaction and knowledge sharing patterns. The findings revealed differences among the three groups that were consistent with their cultural backgrounds. U.S. developers, who are from an individualistic culture, asked and responded to more questions, had higher average reputations, used the pronoun “I” more frequently, and were more task- focused. Conversely, Chinese developers, who are from a collectivistic culture, provided more extensive commenting and editing of posts, used the pronouns “we” and “you” more frequently, and were more likely to engage in information exchange. Russian developers had been using Stack Overflow the longest and were the most reflective. The cultural patterns identified in this study have numerous implications for enhancing in- group interactions and behaviour management among software development communities

Features that Predict the Acceptability of Java and JavaScript Answers on Stack Overflow

Context: It is not uncommon for a new team member to join an existing Agile software development team, even after development has started. This new team member faces a number of challenges before they are integrated into the team and can contribute productively to team progress. Ideally, each newcomer should be supported in this transition through an effective team onboarding program, although prior evidence suggests that this is challenging for many organisations. Objective: We seek to understand how Agile teams address the challenge of team onboarding in order to inform future onboarding design. Method: We conducted an interview survey of eleven participants from eight organisations to investigate what onboarding activities are common across Agile software development teams. We also identify common goals of onboarding from a synthesis of literature. A repertory grid instrument is used to map the contributions of onboarding techniques to onboarding goals. Results: Our study reveals that a broad range of team onboarding techniques, both formal and informal, are used in practice. It also shows that particular techniques that have high contributions to a given goal or set of goals. Conclusions: In presenting a set of onboarding goals to consider and an evidence-based mechanism for selecting techniques to achieve the desired goals it is expected that this study will contribute to better-informed onboarding design and planning. An increase in practitioner awareness of the options for supporting new team members is also an expected outcome.Comment: Conference, 11 pages, 3 figures, 2 table

Using Personality Detection Tools for Software Engineering Research: How Far Can We Go?

Assessing the personality of software engineers may help to match individual traits with the characteristics of development activities such as code review and testing, as well as support managers in team composition. However, self-assessment questionnaires are not a practical solution for collecting multiple observations on a large scale. Instead, automatic personality detection, while overcoming these limitations, is based on off-the-shelf solutions trained on non-technical corpora, which might not be readily applicable to technical domains like software engineering. In this paper, we first assess the performance of general-purpose personality detection tools when applied to a technical corpus of developers’ emails retrieved from the public archives of the Apache Software Foundation. We observe a general low accuracy of predictions and an overall disagreement among the tools. Second, we replicate two previous research studies in software engineering by replacing the personality detection tool used to infer developers’ personalities from pull-request discussions and emails. We observe that the original results are not confirmed, i.e., changing the tool used in the original study leads to diverging conclusions. Our results suggest a need for personality detection tools specially targeted for the software engineering domain

Analyzing confidentiality and privacy concerns: insights from Android issue logs

Context: Post-release user feedback plays an integral role in improving software quality and informing new features. Given its growing importance, feedback concerning security enhancements is particularly noteworthy. In considering the rapid uptake of Android we have examined the scale and severity of Android security threats as reported by its stakeholders. Objective: We systematically mine Android issue logs to derive insights into stakeholder perceptions and experiences in relation to certain Android security issues. Method: We employed contextual analysis techniques to study issues raised regarding confidentiality and privacy in the last three major Android releases, considering covariance of stakeholder comments, and the level of consistency in user preferences and priorities. Results: Confidentiality and privacy concerns varied in severity, and were most prevalent over Jelly Bean releases. Issues raised in regard to confidentiality related mostly to access, user credentials and permission management, while privacy concerns were mainly expressed about phone locking. Community users also expressed divergent preferences for new security features, ranging from more relaxed to very strict. Conclusions: Strategies that support continuous corrective measures for both old and new Android releases would likely maintain stakeholder confidence. An approach that provides users with basic default security settings, but with the power to configure additional security features if desired, would provide the best balance for Android's wide cohort of stakeholders

Analysis and visualization of multimodal socio-technical information of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) Projects

Personality traits influence most, if not all, of the human activities, from those as natural as the way people walk, talk, dress and write to those most complex as the way they interact with others. Most importantly, personality influences the way people make decisions including, in the case of developers, the criteria they consider when selecting a software project they want to participate. Most of the works that study the influence of social, technical and human factors in software development projects have been focused on the impact of communications in software quality. For instance, on identifying predictors to detect files that may contain bugs before releasing an enhanced version of a software product. Only a few of these works focus on the analysis of personality traits of developers with commit permissions (committers) in Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS) projects and their relationship with the software artifacts they interact with. This thesis presents an approach, based on the automatic recognition of personality traits from e-mails sent by committers in FLOSS projects, to uncover relationships between the social and technical aspects that occur during software development processes. Experimental results suggest the existence of some relationships among personality traits projected by the committers through their e-mails and the social (communication) and technical activities they undertake.Maestrí