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.