TY - GEN
T1 - Arsonists or firefighters? Affectiveness in agile software development
AU - Ortu, Marco
AU - Destefanis, Giuseppe
AU - Counsell, Steve
AU - Swift, Stephen
AU - Tonelli, Roberto
AU - Marchesi, Michele
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - In this paper, we present an analysis of more than 500K comments from open-source repositories of software systems developed using agile methodologies. Our aim is to empirically determine how developers interact with each other under certain psychological conditions generated by politeness, sentiment and emotion expressed within developers’ comments. Developers involved in an open-source projects do not usually know each other; they mainly communicate through mailing lists, chat, and tools such as issue tracking systems. The way in which they communicate affects the development process and the productivity of the people involved in the project. We evaluated politeness, sentiment and emotions of comments posted by agile developers and studied the communication flow to understand how they interacted in the presence of impolite and negative comments (and vice versa). Our analysis shows that “firefighters” prevail. When in presence of impolite or negative comments, the probability of the next comment being impolite or negative is 13% and 25 %, respectively; ANGER however, has a probability of 40% of being followed by a further ANGER comment. The result could help managers take control the development phases of a system, since social aspects can seriously affect a developer’s productivity. In a distributed agile environment this may have a particular resonance.
AB - In this paper, we present an analysis of more than 500K comments from open-source repositories of software systems developed using agile methodologies. Our aim is to empirically determine how developers interact with each other under certain psychological conditions generated by politeness, sentiment and emotion expressed within developers’ comments. Developers involved in an open-source projects do not usually know each other; they mainly communicate through mailing lists, chat, and tools such as issue tracking systems. The way in which they communicate affects the development process and the productivity of the people involved in the project. We evaluated politeness, sentiment and emotions of comments posted by agile developers and studied the communication flow to understand how they interacted in the presence of impolite and negative comments (and vice versa). Our analysis shows that “firefighters” prevail. When in presence of impolite or negative comments, the probability of the next comment being impolite or negative is 13% and 25 %, respectively; ANGER however, has a probability of 40% of being followed by a further ANGER comment. The result could help managers take control the development phases of a system, since social aspects can seriously affect a developer’s productivity. In a distributed agile environment this may have a particular resonance.
KW - Agile
KW - Data mining
KW - Human aspect
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84971504934&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-33515-5_12
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-33515-5_12
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84971504934
SN - 9783319335148
VL - 251
T3 - Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing
SP - 144
EP - 155
BT - Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming - 17th International Conference, XP 2016, Proceedings
PB - Springer Nature Link
T2 - 17th International Conference on Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, XP 2016
Y2 - 24 May 2016 through 27 May 2016
ER -