Year: 2021
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Open Source Software development is a collective activity that involves different software \ndevelopers who may differ from each other. Although, previous researchers have focused on \ntechnical aspects like code factors, technology used etc, recently researchers have explored \nnon-technical human aspects like personality, ethnicity and gender to measure various \noutcomes. This research assists the emerging state-of-the-art body on diversity research \nwith an empirical study that analyzes how the personality and, the race and ethnic diversity \nof members in a collaborative group relates to their collaborative contributions in Open \nSource Software(OSS) development. \nThis research contains two parts - In the first part we analyse the collaborative group \nmembers’ personalities and frequency of their collaborative contributions. In the second \npart we analyse the relationship between the diversity of collaborative group members’ \nrace and ethnicity, and the frequency of their collaborative contributions in GitHub. We \ninfer collaborative groups within a project based on the collaboration between software \ndevelopers in that project. Since previous studies have shown pull requests as the major \ncontribution for a developer to be accepted as a group member, we measure the collabora- \ntive contributions of the group members by the number of pull request the group members \nhave merged collaboratively. \nOur results from the first part of our research, indicate that 1) the personality traits of \ncollaborative group members does have a relationship with the frequency of their collab- \norative contributions. Specifically, the more conscientious and less extroverted the group \nmembers are, the more contributions that the group members merged. Furthermore, 2) \ngroups that are more diverse with respect to Conscientiousness or Neuroticism have a \nnegative relationship with the frequency of their collaborative contributions. Finally, 3) \ncollaborative groups that are having a majority of highly open, conscientious, or neurotic \ndevelopers have a positive relationship with their collaborative contributions as well. \nAlso, from the second part of our research, We observe that (1) a major part of the \ndeveloper population are White developers; (2) homogeneous and heterogeneous collabo- \nrative groups, with respect to race and ethnicity of their group members, have a different \ndistribution of collaborative contributions, with heterogeneous groups having more num- \nber of contributions than homogeneous groups and (3) Diversity of race and ethnicity of \nmembers in a collaborative group does have a positive statistically significant relationship \nwith the frequency of collaborative group members’ contributions.
Source: UWSpace (University of Waterloo)
Authors: Sheik Saleem, Sheik Shameer
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Science Applications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3169858560