Impacts of Software Community Patterns on Process and Product:An Empirical Study

Software engineering projects are now more than ever a community effort. In the recent past, researchers have shownthat their success may not only depend on source code quality, but also on other aspects like the balance of distance,culture, global engineering practices, and more. In such a scenario, understanding the characteristics of the communityaround a project and foresee possible problems may be the key to develop successful systems. In this paper, we focuson this research problem and propose an exploratory study on the relation between community patterns, i.e., recurrentmixes of organizational or social structure types, and aspects related to the quality of software products and processes.We ?rst exploit association rule mining to discover frequent relations between community pattern and communitysmells, i.e., sub-optimal patterns across the organizational structure of a software development community that may beprecursors of some form of social debt. Further on, we use statistical analysis to understand their impact on softwaremaintainability and on the development process. Our ?ndings show that different organizational patterns are connectedto di?erent forms of socio-technical problems; further on, speci?c combinations are set in equally speci?c contextualconditions. Findings support two possible conclusions: (1) practitioners should put in place speci?c preventive actionsaimed at avoiding the emergence of community smells and (2) such actions should be drawn according to the contextualconditions of the organization and the project.

如今，软件工程项目比以往任何时候都更依赖于社区协作。近年来，研究者已证实，项目的成功不仅取决于源代码质量，还受多方面因素影响，例如地域距离、文化差异、全球工程实践等方面的平衡。在此背景下，洞悉项目所属社区的特征并预判潜在问题，或许是打造成功软件系统的关键所在。针对该研究问题，本文展开一项探索性研究，探讨社区模式（community patterns，即反复出现的组织或社会结构类型组合）与软件产品及开发流程质量相关维度之间的关联。首先，我们利用关联规则挖掘（association rule mining）技术，发掘社区模式与社区异味（community smells）之间的高频关联；社区异味指的是软件开发社区组织结构中存在的次优模式，可能是各类社会债务的潜在前兆。随后，我们通过统计分析手段，探究上述关联对软件可维护性及开发流程的影响。研究结果表明，不同的组织模式与各异的社会技术问题存在关联；此外，特定的模式组合仅适用于特定的情境条件。本研究结论可归纳为两点：其一，从业者应制定针对性的预防措施，以规避社区异味的产生；其二，此类预防措施需结合组织与项目的具体情境来制定。