How Gamification Affects Software Developers: Cautionary Evidence from a Natural Experiment on GitHub

Moldon, Lukas; Strohmaier, Markus; Wachs, Johannes

doi:10.1109/icse43902.2021.00058

Cited by 24 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 71 publications

(65 reference statements)

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“…On DEV users describe, in plain text, their skills and preferences on their user profiles and indirectly via their posts. Data from DEV could be used to revisit important social factors in software engineering including gender gaps and disparities [32]- [34], the relationship between geography and collaboration [35], [36], and the effects of gamification on user behavior [37]. Of particular interest is the site's social network, the structure and dynamics of which could be contrasted with developer networks on GitHub [38].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mining DEV for social and technical insights about software development

Papoutsoglou,

Wachs,

Kapitsaki

2021

Preprint

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Software developers are social creatures: they communicate, collaborate, and promote their work in a variety of channels. Twitter, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and other platforms offer developers opportunities to network and exchange ideas. Researchers analyze content on these sites to learn about trends and topics in software engineering. However, insight mined from the text of Stack Overflow questions or GitHub issues is highly focused on detailed and technical aspects of software development. In this paper, we present a relatively new online community for software developers called DEV. On DEV users write long-form posts about their experiences, preferences, and working life in software, zooming out from specific issues and files to reflect on broader topics. About 50,000 users have posted over 140,000 articles related to software development. In this work, we describe the content of posts on DEV using a topic model, showing that developers discuss a rich variety and mixture of social and technical aspects of software development. We show that developers use DEV to promote themselves and their work: 83% link their profiles to their GitHub profiles and 56% to their Twitter profiles. 14% of users pin specific GitHub repos in their profiles. We argue that DEV is emerging as an important hub for software developers, and a valuable source of insight for researchers to complement data from platforms like GitHub and Stack Overflow.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mining DEV for social and technical insights about software development

Papoutsoglou,

Wachs,

Kapitsaki

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…An adaptation to an industrial setting, and also to the context of open source projects development will be tackled as future work. Nevertheless, in [21], some perverse effects of gamification elements introduced in collaborative development platforms, such as GitHub, are analysed. This sort of issues must be taken into account when adapting to that settings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carrot and Stick approaches revisited when managing Technical Debt in an educational context

Crespo¹,

González-Escribano²,

Piattini³

2021

Preprint

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“…Moreover, when moving from Bugzilla to GitHub, the communication between maintainers and contributors in the issues also increased. Moldon et al (2020) focused on how developers' behavior was impacted by the removal of the daily activity streak counters from the user profile. The results show that the developer activity decreased on weekends compared to weekdays.…”

Section: Using Rdd To Access the Effects Of Interventions On Software...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Quality gatekeepers: investigating the effects of code review bots on pull request activities

et al. 2022

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Software bots have been facilitating several development activities in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However, these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently occurs with new technology adoption. Understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management. To analyze these effects, we investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code review bot. We employed a regression discontinuity design on 1,194 software projects from GitHub. We also interviewed 12 practitioners, including open-source maintainers and contributors. Our results indicate that the adoption of code review bots increases the number of monthly merged pull requests, decreases monthly non-merged pull requests, and decreases communication among developers. From the developers’ perspective, these effects are explained by the transparency and confidence the bot comments introduce, in addition to the changes in the discussion focused on pull requests. Practitioners and maintainers may leverage our results to understand, or even predict, bot effects on their projects.

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How Gamification Affects Software Developers: Cautionary Evidence from a Natural Experiment on GitHub

Cited by 24 publications

References 71 publications

Mining DEV for social and technical insights about software development

Mining DEV for social and technical insights about software development

Carrot and Stick approaches revisited when managing Technical Debt in an educational context

Quality gatekeepers: investigating the effects of code review bots on pull request activities

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