TY - JOUR
T1 - Software development: Do good manners matter?
AU - Destefanis, Giuseppe
AU - Ortu, Marco
AU - Counsell, Steve
AU - Swift, Stephen
AU - Marchesi, Michele
AU - Tonelli, Roberto
N1 - This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Computer Science) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
PY - 2016/7/18
Y1 - 2016/7/18
N2 - A successful software project is the result of a complex process involving, above all, people. Developers are the key factors for the success of a software development process, not merely as executors of tasks, but as protagonists and core of the whole development process. This paper investigates social aspects among developers working on software projects developed with the support of Agile tools. We studied 22 opensource software projects developed using the Agile board of the JIRA repository. All comments committed by developers involved in the projects were analyzed and we explored whether the politeness of comments affected the number of developers involved and the time required to fix any given issue. Our results showed that the level of politeness in the communication process among developers does have an effect on the time required to fix issues and, in the majority of the analysed projects, it had a positive correlation with attractiveness of the project to both active and potential developers. The more polite developers were, the less time it took to fix an issue.
AB - A successful software project is the result of a complex process involving, above all, people. Developers are the key factors for the success of a software development process, not merely as executors of tasks, but as protagonists and core of the whole development process. This paper investigates social aspects among developers working on software projects developed with the support of Agile tools. We studied 22 opensource software projects developed using the Agile board of the JIRA repository. All comments committed by developers involved in the projects were analyzed and we explored whether the politeness of comments affected the number of developers involved and the time required to fix any given issue. Our results showed that the level of politeness in the communication process among developers does have an effect on the time required to fix issues and, in the majority of the analysed projects, it had a positive correlation with attractiveness of the project to both active and potential developers. The more polite developers were, the less time it took to fix an issue.
KW - Issue fixing time
KW - Mining software repositories
KW - Politeness
KW - Social and human aspects
KW - Software development
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85030094455&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.7717/peerj-cs.73
DO - 10.7717/peerj-cs.73
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85030094455
VL - 2016
JO - PeerJ Computer Science
JF - PeerJ Computer Science
IS - 7
M1 - e73
ER -