How diverse is your team? Investigating gender and nationality diversity in GitHub teams

Abstract

Abstract. Building an effective team of developers is a complex task faced by both software companies and open source communities. The problem of forming a "dream" team involves many variables, including consideration of human factors, and it is not a dilemma solvable in a mathematical way. Empirical studies might provide interesting insights to explain which factors need to be taken into account in building a team of developers and which levers act to optimise collaboration and productivity among developers. In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study aimed at investigating the link between team diversity (i.e., gender, nationality) and productivity (issue fixing time). We consider issues solved from the GHTorrent dataset inferring gender and nationality of each team's members. We also evaluate the politeness of all comments involved in issue resolution. Results show that higher gender diversity is linked with a lower team average issue fixing time and that nationality diversity is linked with lower team politeness.

How participative is open source hardware? Insights from online repository mining

“…The availability of versioned data has been turned into profit since a long time in the software branch, where the open source development model has settled since some decades (Cosentino, Luis & Cabot 2016;Kalliamvakou et al 2016;Kim et al 2016;Cosentino, Izquierdo & Cabot 2017). Repository mining techniques and SNA have been combined to study various aspects such as the respective influence between community structure and product structure (Le & Panchal 2012), the role of prior social links on online collaborative development (Casalnuovo et al 2015), the evolution path of contributors from periphery to core (Asri et al 2017) or the gender and nationality diversity of team members (Ortu et al 2016).…”

The impact of personality traits and cultural values on coordination effectiveness: A study of software development teams effectiveness

“…Based on prior studies, 45,99,106 the demographic information of the respondents are important to present the heterogeneity in the sample and interpret results. It was important to analyze the gender diversity in the software development team for group dynamics as suggested by Ortu et al and Vasilescu et al 95,107 This study comprises 112 responses in which most of them were male respondents (81%) than female respondents (19%). In the software development, it was important to analyze the job profile of the respondents as suggested by Shameem et al 20 In our study, out of 112 responses, 57 respondents were the software engineers and represents 51% of the total responses.…”