What Can Developers' Messages Tell Us? A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Jazz Teams' Attitudes and Behavior Patterns

Abstract

Reports that communication and behavioral issues contribute to inadequately performing software teams have fuelled a wealth of research aimed at understanding the human processes employed during software development. The increasing level of interest in human issues is particularly relevant for agile and global software development approaches that emphasize the importance of people and their interactions during projects. While mature analysis techniques in behavioral psychology have been recommended for studying such issues, particularly when using archives and artifacts, these techniques have rarely been used in software engineering research. We utilize these techniques under an embedded case study approach to examine whether IBM Rational Jazz practitioners' behaviors change over project duration and whether certain tasks affect teams' attitudes and behaviors. We found highest levels of project engagement at project start and completion, as well as increasing levels of team collectiveness as projects progressed. Additionally, Jazz practitioners were most insightful and perceptive at the time of project scoping. Further, Jazz teams' attitudes and behaviors varied in line with the nature of the tasks they were performing. We explain these findings and discuss their implications for software project governance and tool design.

Communication and personality profiles of global software developers

“…That said, the notion that teams and individuals are often affected by the tasks under their purview has also been previously supported by empirical evidence [84]. In fact, we also observed a higher incidence of neuroticism (or negative language) among those involved in coding tasks, an observation we believe could be linked to the rigor required in solving challenging computational tasks [46]. Overall, however, our results suggest some uncertainty regarding the personality profile of neuroticism, as we did not find full agreement with prior psycholinguistic theories.…”

“…We assess those communicating on the same tasks as being equally aware of the specific task's knowledge, which may be conveyed to others through further tasks' connections (e.g., in the actual Jazz communication network in Figure 2 contributors 11165 and 4060 are expected to have common knowledge of the tasks they share, which may be conveyed to contributor 6293 via contributors' 11165 and 6293 shared task). Finally, we perused teams' sociograms and also considered how practitioners used work and achievement terms during their exchanges to triangulate our SNA metrics (refer to [45,46,74,75] for examples of our application of psycholinguistics to the study of software practitioners' discourses).…”

Understanding the attitudes, knowledge sharing behaviors and task performance of core developers: A longitudinal study

“…These practitioners typically communicated most in the early and middle phases of the project (see the measures for P1, P2, P5, P7 and P8 in Table 4). Previously we found that, overall, IBM Rational Jazz project teams communicated most in the first and last phases while addressing their development tasks [25,66], and that the less active developers communicated more towards project completion. This finding was also noted by Cataldo and Herbsleb [1], who uncovered that technical dependencies resulted in increased levels of communication for some of the less active developers at various times of the project.…”

Analyzing confidentiality and privacy concerns

“…We extracted a snapshot of the issue tracker, comprising 21,547 issues logged between January 2008 and March 2014. These issues were then imported into a database, and thereafter, we performed data cleaning by executing previously written scripts to remove all HTML tags and foreign characters [15,16], and particularly those in the Summary description field, to avoid confounding of our analysis.…”