Software development: do good manners matter?
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Author and article information
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.
Cite this as
2015. Software development: do good manners matter? PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1515v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1515v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Author comment
This is a submission to PeerJ Computer Science.
Sections
Additional Information
Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Giuseppe Destefanis conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Marco Ortu conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Steve Counsell conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Michele Marchesi contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Roberto Tonelli contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
We used a public dataset available at http://openscience.us/repo/social-analysis/social-aspects.html
Funding
The authors received no funding for this work.
