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Video games make up an important part of the software industry, yet the software engineering community rarely studies video games. This imbalance is a problem if video game development differs from general software development, as some game experts suggest. In this paper we describe a study with 14 interviewees and 364 survey respondents. The study elicited substantial differences between video game development and other software development. For example, in game development, "cowboy coders" are necessary to cope with the continuous interplay between creative desires and technical constraints. Consequently, game developers are hesitant to use automated testing because of these tests' rapid obsolescence in the face of shifting creative desires of game designers. These differences between game and non-game development have implications for research, industry, and practice. For instance, as a starting point for impacting game development, researchers could create testing tools that enable game developers to create tests that assert flexible behavior with little up-front investment.

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Security tools can help developers build more secure software systems by helping developers detect or fix security vulnerabilities in source code. However, developers do not always use these tools. In this paper, we investigate a number of social factors that impact developers' adoption decisions, based on a multidisciplinary field of research called diffusion of innovations. We conducted 42 one-on-one interviews with professional software developers, and our results suggest a number of ways in which security tool adoption depends on developers' social environments and on the channels through which information about tools is communicated. For example, some participants trusted developers with strong reputations on the Internet as much as they trust their colleagues for information about security tools.

Abstract-Doing high quality research about the human side of software engineering necessitates the participation of real software developers in studies, but getting high levels of participation is a challenge for software engineering researchers. In this paper, we discuss several factors that software engineering researchers can use when recruiting participants, drawn from a combination of general research on survey design, research on persuasion, and our experience in conducting surveys. We study these factors by performing post-hoc analysis on several previously conducted surveys. Our results provide insight into the factors associated with increased response rates, which are neither wholly composed of factors associated strictly with persuasion research, nor those of conventional wisdom in software engineering.

Biases against women in the workplace have been documented in a variety of studies. This paper presents the largest study to date on gender bias, where we compare acceptance rates of contributions from men versus women in an open source software community. Surprisingly, our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's. However, women's acceptance rates are higher only when they are not identifiable as women. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.