Refactoring Community Smells in the Wild: The Practitioner’s Field Manual

Community smells have been defined as sub-optimal organizational structures that may lead to social debt. Previous studies have shown that they are highly diffused in both open- and closed-source projects, are perceived as harmful by practitioners, and can even lead to the introduction of technical debt in source code. Despite the presence of this body of research, little is known on the practitioners' perceived prominence of community smells in practice as well as on the strategies adopted to deal with them. This paper aims at bridging this gap by proposing an empirical study in which 76 software practitioners are inquired on (i) the prominence of four well-known community smells, i.e., Organizational Silo, Black Cloud, Lone Wolf, and Radio Silence, in their contexts and ii) the methods they adopted to ``refactor'' them. Our results first reveal that community smells frequently manifest themselves in software projects and, more importantly, there exist specific refactoring practices to deal with each of the considered community smells.<br>

社区不良气味（community smells）被定义为可能引发社交债务的次优组织结构。既往研究表明，这类现象广泛分布于开源与闭源项目中，被从业者认定为具有危害性，甚至可能导致源代码中引入技术债务（technical debt）。尽管已有大量相关研究，但目前对从业者在实际工作中感知到的社区不良气味的突出程度，以及他们应对此类问题所采用的策略，仍了解甚少。本研究旨在填补这一研究空白，开展一项实证研究：对76名软件从业者进行调研，调研内容涵盖两方面：一是四种典型社区不良气味——组织竖井（Organizational Silo）、黑云（Black Cloud）、孤狼（Lone Wolf）与静默沉默（Radio Silence）——在其工作场景中的突出程度；二是他们用于‘重构’此类问题的方法。研究结果首先显示，社区不良气味在软件项目中频繁出现；更为关键的是，针对本次调研涉及的每一种社区不良气味，均存在针对性的重构实践方案以应对。