Software development: do good manners matter?

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1 Department of Computer Science, Brunel University, London, United Kingdom
2 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.1515v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Data Mining and Machine Learning, Data Science, Software Engineering
Keywords
social and human aspects, politeness, mining software repositories, issue fixing time, software development
Copyright
© 2015 Destefanis et al.
Licence
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 PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Destefanis G, Ortu M, Counsell S, Marchesi M, Tonelli R. 2015. Software development: do good manners matter? PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1515v1

Abstract

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 open source 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. In the majority of the analysed cases, the more developers wanted to be part of a project, the more they were willing to continue working on the project over time.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ Computer Science.