Telling Stories about Software Developers

Alexander Serebrenik Eindhoven University of Technology, NL

@aserebrenik

— Robbert Jongeling

Story 1: Women, men and software

Bastiaan Heemskerck, Men and women, some carrying baskets, ca. 1700, KMSKB, Brussel

I know a lot of female programmers […] But I don’t recall

ever having one of my questions answered by, nor have I ever

answered a question by a female programmer here at StackOverflow.

Why aren’t there more of them participating, both

with questions and answers?

there is NO appeal for me in answering questions.[…]

it doesn’t entertain me and I don’t find much fulfilment in it

https://github.com/tue-mdse/

genderComputer + manual analysis

0

25

50

75

100

Open Source StackOverflow Drupal Commercial

4

37,5

72

86

55,5

95

28

1075

Women Men Unknown

Bogdan Vasilescu, Andrea Capiluppi, Alexander Serebrenik: Gender, Representation and Online Participation: A Quantitative Study. Interacting with Computers 26(5): 488-511 (2014)

FLOSS 2003 sample 4144 multiple mailing lists

NSF survey “math + CS”

Drupal / Wordpress StackOverflow

Duration of engagement Comparable Men engage for

longer

Questions (relative to duration of

engagement)

Comparable Women ask more questions

Answers (relative to duration of

engagement)Comparable Comparable

Bogdan Vasilescu, Andrea Capiluppi, Alexander Serebrenik: Gender, Representation and Online Participation: A Quantitative Study. Interacting with Computers 26(5): 488-511 (2014)

Women are less effective than men in competitive environments.

Perform similarly in non-competitive environments.

Loss of effectiveness stronger when women compete against men than in single-sex competitive environments.

Women shy away from competition and men embrace it

Uri Gneezy, Muriel Niederle, and Aldo Rustichini. Performance in competitive environments: Gender differences. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(3):1049–1074, 2003.

Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund. Do women shy away from competition? do men compete too much? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(3):1067–1101, 2007.

Update: Anno 2016

Josh Terrell et al.

gender Computer

Bin Lin, Alexander Serebrenik: Recognizing gender of stack overflow users. MSR 2016: 425-429

Adding GitHub helps Different data sets require different techniques

Nicolaas Pietersz. Berchem (1620 - 1683). Harvest, KMSKB, Brussel

Nicolaas Pietersz. Berchem (1620 - 1683). Harvest, KMSKB, Brussel

Does diversity help?

People prefer working with others similar to them in terms of values,

beliefs, and attitudes [Byrne]

People categorise themselves into specific groups. Members of

own group are treated better than outsiders [Tajfel]

Diversity is bad

Multicultural social networks promote creativity

[Harvard Business School]

Diversity is good

Diverse problem solvers outperform high ability problem

solvers [Hong & Page]

Bogdan Vasilescu, Daryl Posnett, Baishakhi Ray, Mark G. J. van den Brand, Alexander Serebrenik, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Vladimir Filkov: Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams. CHI 2015: 3789-3798

Bogdan Vasilescu, Daryl Posnett, Baishakhi Ray, Mark G. J. van den Brand, Alexander Serebrenik, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Vladimir Filkov: Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams. CHI 2015: 3789-3798

code sees no color or genderI have used a fake GitHub handle (my normal GitHub handle is my first name,

which is a distinctly female name) so that people would assume I was male

interactions are usually positive too, with occasional

sexism, but nothing more then one encounters in the rest of life

I'm the only female developer, as well as the youngest, which

can sometimes be frustrating.

Mostly positive. A few collaborators were difficult to collaborate with, hard to discern the real cause. Only one or two were gender related, but one caused me to leave a project.

Bogdan Vasilescu, Vladimir Filkov, Alexander Serebrenik: Perceptions of Diversity on Git Hub: A User Survey. CHASE@ICSE 2015: 50-56

In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to

making participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and

expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.

Parastou Tourani, Bram Adams, Alexander Serebrenik: Code of Conduct in Open Source Projects. SANER 2017: accepted

GitHub hits

1

100

10000

Contributor Covenant

Open Code of Conduct

PythonCitizen

UbuntuDjango

Geek Feminism

Parastou Tourani, Bram Adams, Alexander Serebrenik: Code of Conduct in Open Source Projects. SANER 2017: accepted

Open Question:

Do Codes of Conduct work?

Story 2: How do they communicate?

Jos Manders. Communication. ca. 1965. SMAK - Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst. Ghent

Jacques Hersleven. Postier télégraphiste de l'Hôtel des postes et télégraphes de Bruxelles, ca. 1930, Reportage. Bruxelles.

Sulpice Guillaume Gavarni (1804 - 1866). Man reading a letter in front of his bed. Museum Mayer van den Bergh. Antwerpen.

Bogdan Vasilescu, Alexander Serebrenik, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Vladimir Filkov: How social Q&A sites are changing knowledge sharing in open source software communities. CSCW 2014: 342-354

Bogdan Vasilescu, Alexander Serebrenik, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Vladimir Filkov: How social Q&A sites are changing knowledge sharing in open source software communities. CSCW 2014: 342-354

Bogdan Vasilescu, Alexander Serebrenik, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Vladimir Filkov: How social Q&A sites are changing knowledge sharing in open source software communities. CSCW 2014: 342-354

reputation ratings are a nice little initiative

r-help used to be very helpful. But as the number of posts has gone up, I find that

reading it is not as useful as it had been

peer recognition/gamificationwithin StackOverflow

Google is getting better at finding answers related to R so I use it more. I rely less on

going directly to mailing lists now

Bogdan Vasilescu, Alexander Serebrenik, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Vladimir Filkov: How social Q&A sites are changing knowledge sharing in open source software communities. CSCW 2014: 342-354

Bin Lin, Alexey Zagalsky, Margaret-Anne D. Storey, Alexander Serebrenik: Why Developers Are Slacking Off: Understanding How Software Teams Use Slack. CSCW Companion 2016: 333-336

Community-wide 13%

Personal 14%

Team-wide 73%

Discovery andnews/information

aggregationNetworking and social activities

Fun

CommunicationCollaboration

Customer supportDevOps

Communities of practice

Kids like new toys?

Actualit. Boudewijn & Josephine-Charlotte with a toy train. 1938. Koninklijke schenking. Koningin Elisabeth, Brussels.

Frans Floris de Vriendt (1519-1570). Three heads. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium.

James A. Russell. A circumplex model of affect. Journal of personality and social psychology, 39(6):1161–1178, 1980. Paul E. Ekman, & R.J. Davidson. The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions. 1994 Oxford University Press.

valence/arousal discrete

Information Retrieval Human-Computer Interaction

polarity lexicons

• E. Guzman, B. Bruegge, Towards emotional awareness in software development teams, FSE 2013

• D. Garcia, M. S. Zanetti, F. Schweitzer, The role of emotions in contributors activity: A case study on the Gentoo community, in ICCGC, 2013

• E. Guzman, D. Azócar,, Y. Li, Sentiment analysis of commit comments in GitHub: An empirical study, MSR 2014

• A.-I. Rousinopoulos, G. Robles, and J. M. González-Barahona, Sentiment analysis of Free/Open Source developers: preliminary findings from a case study, Revista Eletrônica de Sistemas de Informação, 2014

• D. Pletea, B. Vasilescu, A. Serebrenik, Security and emotion: Sentiment analysis of security discussions on GitHub, MSR 2014

• M. M. Rahman, C.K. Roy, I. Keivanloo: Recommending insightful comments for source code using crowdsourced knowledge. SCAM 2015: 81-90

• M. Ortu, B. Adams, G. Destefanis, P. Tourani, M. Marchesi, R. Tonelli: Are Bullies More Productive? Empirical Study of Affectiveness vs. Issue Fixing Time. MSR 2015: 303-313

• F. Calefato, F. Lanubile, M. C. Marasciulo, N. Novielli: Mining Successful Answers in Stack Overflow. MSR 2015: 430-433

• …

What is the best way to kill a critical

process?

I’m missing a parenthesis. But

where?

Nicole Novielli, Fabio Calefato, Filippo Lanubile: The challenges of sentiment detection in the social programmer ecosystem. SSE@SIGSOFT FSE 2015: 33-40 Robbert Jongeling, Proshanta Sarkar, Subhajit Datta, Alexander Serebrenik. On Negative Results when using Sentiment Analysis Tools for Software Engineering Research. Accepted subject to minor revision at Empirical Software Engineering

What is going on?

What is the best way to kill a critical process?

pos. neg. neg.

What is the best way to kill a critical

process?

I’m missing a parenthesis. But

where?

Nicole Novielli, Fabio Calefato, Filippo Lanubile: The challenges of sentiment detection in the social programmer ecosystem. SSE@SIGSOFT FSE 2015: 33-40 Robbert Jongeling, Proshanta Sarkar, Subhajit Datta, Alexander Serebrenik. On Negative Results when using Sentiment Analysis Tools for Software Engineering Research. Accepted subject to minor revision at Empirical Software Engineering

Tools tend to disagree (κ ≤ 0.25)

Robbert Jongeling, Proshanta Sarkar, Subhajit Datta, Alexander Serebrenik. On Negative Results when using Sentiment Analysis Tools for Software Engineering Research. Accepted subject to minor revision at Empirical Software Engineering

Robbert Jongeling, Proshanta Sarkar, Subhajit Datta, Alexander Serebrenik. On Negative Results when using Sentiment Analysis Tools for Software Engineering Research. Accepted subject to minor revision at Empirical Software Engineering

David Teniers II (1601-1700), The monkey-painter. Coppée collection. Brussels

D. Pletea, B. Vasilescu, A. Serebrenik, Security and

emotion: Sentiment analysis of security discussions on

GitHub, MSR 2014

E. Guzman, D. Azócar,, Y. Li, Sentiment analysis of commit

comments in GitHub: An empirical study, MSR 2014

D. Pletea, B. Vasilescu, A. Serebrenik, Security and

emotion: Sentiment analysis of security discussions on

GitHub, MSR 2014

E. Guzman, D. Azócar,, Y. Li, Sentiment analysis of commit

comments in GitHub: An empirical study, MSR 2014

D. Pletea, B. Vasilescu, A. Serebrenik, Security and

emotion: Sentiment analysis of security discussions on

GitHub, MSR 2014

E. Guzman, D. Azócar,, Y. Li, Sentiment analysis of commit

comments in GitHub: An empirical study, MSR 2014

Guzman et al. Java projects are more negative than projects in other languages ✖

Guzman et al. Comments on Mondays are more negative than on other days ✖

Pletea et al. Security comments/discussions are more often negative than non-security comments/discussions ✔

Pletea et al. Security discussions are more emotional than non-security ones ✖

Robbert Jongeling, Proshanta Sarkar, Subhajit Datta, Alexander Serebrenik. On Negative Results when using Sentiment Analysis Tools for Software Engineering Research. Accepted subject to minor revision at Empirical Software Engineering

We need more tools/models:

Software engineering specific Emotions are more appropriate than merely polarity

Preliminary results: see papers by Ortu et al., Destefanis et al.

Bastiaan Heemskerck, Men and women, some carrying baskets, ca. 1700, KMSKB, Brussel

Jos Manders. Communication. ca. 1965. SMAK - Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst. Ghent

— Grady Booch

Grady Booch: Remembrance of Things Past. IEEE Software 33(1): 10-12 (2016)

Adrien Joseph Heymans (1839-1921) The way to 't Zand (Wechelderzande)

And there are many more stories to tell!