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How diverse is your team? Investigating gender and nationality diversity in GitHub teams

Marco Ortu,Giuseppe Destefanis,S. Counsell,S. Swift,R. Tonelli,M. Marchesi

Published 2017 in Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development

ABSTRACT

BackgroundBuilding an effective team of developers is a complex task faced by both software companies and open source communities. The problem of forming a “dream”team involves many variables, including consideration of human factors and it is not adilemma solvable in a mathematical way. Empirical studies might provide interesting insights to explain which factors need to be taken into account in building a team of developers and which levers act to optimise productivity among developers.AimIn this paper, we present the results of an empirical study aimed at investigating the link between team diversity (i.e., gender, nationality) and productivity (issue fixing time).MethodWe consider issues solved from the GHTorrent dataset inferring gender and nationality of each team’s members. We also evaluate the politeness of all comments involved in issue resolution.ResultsResults show that higher gender diversity is linked with a lower team average issue fixing time (higher productivity), that nationality diversity is linked with lower team politeness and that gender diversity is linked with higher sentiment.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2017

  • Venue

    Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development

  • Publication date

    2017-12-20

  • Fields of study

    Biology, Sociology, Computer Science

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.1186/s40411-017-0044-y
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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