Paper Info
Title
Arsonists or Firefighters? Affectiveness in Agile Software Development.
Abstract
In this paper, we present an analysis of more than 500 K comments from open-source repositories of software systems developed using agile methodologies. Our aim is to empirically determine how developers interact with each other under certain psychological conditions generated by politeness, sentiment and emotion expressed within developers’ comments. Developers involved in an open-source projects do not usually know each other; they mainly communicate through mailing lists, chat, and tools such as issue tracking systems. The way in which they communicate affects the development process and the productivity of the people involved in the project. We evaluated politeness, sentiment and emotions of comments posted by agile developers and studied the communication flow to understand how they interacted in the presence of impolite and negative comments (and vice versa). Our analysis shows that “firefighters” prevail. When in presence of impolite or negative comments, the probability of the next comment being impolite or negative is 13 % and 25 %, respectively; ANGER however, has a probability of 40 % of being followed by a further ANGER comment. The result could help managers take control the development phases of a system, since social aspects can seriously affect a developer’s productivity. In a distributed agile environment this may have a particular resonance.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
XP
Information system,Management information systems,Agile Unified Process,Politeness,Knowledge management,Software system,Agile software development,Agile usability engineering,Systems development life cycle,Engineering
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
5
0.42
References 
Authors
14
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marco Ortu126716.83
Giuseppe Destefanis223720.74
Steve Counsell31732117.90
Stephen Swift4203.83
R. Tonelli523718.42
Michele Marchesi6807120.28