Beyond Technical Aspects: How Do Community Smells Influence the Intensity of Code Smells?

Abstract

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Gender Diversity and Community Smells: Insights From the Trenches

“…Costs of poor communication are estimated as $37 billion [16]. This motivated the research on "social debt" [12], i.e., the presence of non-cohesive development communities whose members have communication or coordination issues, and to identify community smells [3], socio-technical characteristics and patterns, which may lead to the emergence of social and technical debt [5].…”

Gender Diversity and Women in Software Teams: How Do They Affect Community Smells?

“…Software communities are affected by this smell in cases where there is an excessive information overload due to the lack of structured communication. As the Black Cloud effect corresponds to the manifested presence of overwhelming quantities of asynch and synch data exchanges across a community, we expect that the presence of more diversity mediates positively on the presence of black clouds; furthermore, it might have an effect with respect to the tenor of communications (i.e., more positive and focused as opposed to nastier and wider) [4]. Lone Wolf Effect.…”

“…Several recent studies have focused on the so-called "community smells", patterns indicating suboptimal organization and communication of software development teams that can lead to unforeseen project costs [3]. Community smells have been also linked to code smells, indications of poor design, coding, and implementation choices [4], [5].…”

“…Based on such findings, we conjecture that a more diverse composition of development teams impacts the number of emerging community smells. Should this be verified, it would have a direct implication for project managers with respect to how to allocate resources in a way to reduce community-related problems, as well as on how to indirectly improving also the quality of the product being developed [4], [5].…”

“…We seek therefore to verify our conjecture, and assess the role of gender diversity and women participation on community smells. More specifically, in this study we consider four of the community smells defined and operationalized by Tamburri et al [3], [4], i.e., Organizational Silo, Black Cloud, Lone Wolf, and Radio Silence. All of them refer to suboptimal characteristics of a development community that might be mitigated by the presence of women.…”