Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Volume 47, Issue 3, Pages 630-652Publisher
IEEE COMPUTER SOC
DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2019.2901490
Keywords
Software engineering; Open source software; Organizational aspects; Social networking (online); Tools; Microstructure; Software organisational structures; software community smells; human aspects in software engineering; social software engineering; empirical software engineering
Funding
- SNSF Project named Data-driven Contemporary Code Review [PP00P2_170529]
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Software engineering success relies on balancing distance, culture, global engineering practices and more. This paper introduces an automated approach, CodeFace4Smells, to identify four community smell types. A large-scale empirical study on 60 open-source communities reveals that community smells are highly diffused in open-source and perceived by developers as significant issues for software community evolution.
Software engineering is now more than ever a community effort. Its success often weighs on balancing distance, culture, global engineering practices and more. In this scenario many unforeseen socio-technical events may result into additional project cost or social debt, e.g., sudden, collective employee turnover. With industrial research we discovered community smells, that is, sub-optimal patterns across the organisational and social structure in a software development community that are precursors of such nasty socio-technical events. To understand the impact of community smells at large, in this paper we first introduce CodeFace4Smells, an automated approach able to identify four community smell types that reflect socio-technical issues that have been shown to be detrimental both the software engineering and organisational research fields. Then, we perform a large-scale empirical study involving over 100 years worth of releases and communication structures data of 60 open-source communities: we evaluate (i) their diffuseness, i.e., how much are they distributed in open-source, (ii) how developers perceive them, to understand whether practitioners recognize their presence and their negative effects in practice, and (iii) how community smells relate to existing socio-technical factors, with the aim of assessing the inter-relations between them. The key findings of our study highlight that community smells are highly diffused in open-source and are perceived by developers as relevant problems for the evolution of software communities. Moreover, a number of state-of-the-art socio-technical indicators (e.g., socio-technical congruence) can be used to monitor how healthy a community is and possibly avoid the emergence of social debt.
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