Interpersonal Conflicts During Code Review

Code review consists of manual inspection, discussion, and judgment of source code by developers other than the code's author. Due to discussions around competing ideas and group decision-making processes, interpersonal conflicts during code reviews are expected. This study systematically investigates how developers perceive code review conflicts and addresses interpersonal conflicts during code reviews as a theoretical construct. Through the thematic analysis of interviews conducted with 22 developers, we confirm that conflicts during code reviews are commonplace, anticipated and seen as normal by developers. Even though conflicts do happen and carry a negative impact for the review, conflicts-if resolved constructively-can also create value and bring improvement. Moreover, the analysis provided insights on how strongly conflicts during code review and its context (i.e., code, developer, team, organization) are intertwined. Finally, there are aspects specific to code review conflicts that call for the research and application of customized conflict resolution and management techniques, some of which are discussed in this paper. Data and material: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.584879

Characterizing Women (Not) Contributing to Open-Source

Women are under-represented not only in software development, but even more so in the Open-Source Software (OSS) community. In this study we examine whether there are differences between women in OSS community and outside of it. Identifying these differences may help to attract other women to contribute to OSS. Furthermore, it might uncover potential biases in data about female developers that are gathered through the mining of software repositories research. Using the data from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018, counting 100,000+ respondents (6.9% female), we compare the characteristics of women who report to contribute to OSS and those who report to not contribute. Surprisingly, we did not found the expected differences to be present, thus suggesting that open-source software data represents well the closed-source population of female developers. However, our results did not identify potential correlates of higher under-representation of women in OSS than in closed-source setting