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

Marco Ortu; Giuseppe Destefanis; Steve Counsell; Stephen Swift; Roberto Tonelli; Michele Marchesi

doi:10.1186/s40411-017-0044-y

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

Marco Ortu, Giuseppe Destefanis, Steve Counsell, Stephen Swift, Roberto Tonelli, Michele Marchesi

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Abstract

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.

Original language	English
Journal	Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development
Volume	5
Issue number	9
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1186/s40411-017-0044-y
Publication status	Published - 20 Dec 2017

Keywords

Affective analysis
issue report
Empirical software engineering

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Published VersionFinal published version, 1.51 MBLicence: CC BY

https://jserd.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40411-017-0044-yLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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title = "How diverse is your team? Investigating gender and nationality diversity in GitHub teams",

abstract = "BackgroundBuilding 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 adilemma 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.AimIn 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).MethodWe consider issues solved from the GHTorrent dataset inferring gender and nationality of each team{\textquoteright}s members. We also evaluate the politeness of all comments involved in issue resolution.ResultsResults 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.",

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AU - Destefanis, Giuseppe

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AU - Swift, Stephen

AU - Tonelli, Roberto

AU - Marchesi, Michele

N1 - 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.

PY - 2017/12/20

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N2 - BackgroundBuilding 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 adilemma 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.AimIn 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).MethodWe 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.ResultsResults 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.

AB - BackgroundBuilding 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 adilemma 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.AimIn 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).MethodWe 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.ResultsResults 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.

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JF - Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development

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

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Keywords

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