Blogs (1) >>
ICSE 2019
Sat 25 - Fri 31 May 2019 Montreal, QC, Canada

Developers in open source projects must make decisions on contributions from other community members, such as whether or not to accept a pull request. However, secondary factors—beyond the code itself—can influence those decisions. For example, signals from GitHub profiles, such as a number of followers, activity, names, or gender can also be considered when developers make decisions. In this paper, we examine how developers use these signals (or not) when making decisions about code contributions. To evaluate this question, we evaluate how signals related to perceived gender identity and code quality influenced decisions on accepting pull requests. Unlike previous work, we analyze this decision process with data collected from an eye-tracker. We analyzed differences in what signals developers said are important for themselves versus what signals they actually used to make decisions about others. We found that after the code snippet (x=57%), the second place programmers spent their time fixating on supplemental technical signals(x=32%), such as previous contributions and popular repositories. Diverging from what participants reported themselves, we also found that programmers fixated on social signals more than recalled.

Thu 30 May

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

14:00 - 15:30
Software as a Social ConstructSoftware Engineering in Society at Mansfield / Sherbrooke
Chair(s): Damian Andrew Tamburri TU/e
14:00
20m
Talk
An Anatomy of Security Conversations in Stack OverflowSEIS
Software Engineering in Society
Tamara Lopez The Open University, Thein Tun , Arosha K Bandara The Open University, Mark Levine University of Exeter, Bashar Nuseibeh The Open University (UK) & Lero (Ireland), Helen Sharp The Open University, UK
14:20
20m
Talk
Software Engineering in Civic Tech: A Case Study about Code for IrelandSEIS
Software Engineering in Society
Antti Knutas LUT University, Victoria Palacin LUT University, Giovanni Maccani Maynooth University, Markus Helfert Dublin City University
Pre-print
14:40
20m
Talk
Beyond the Code Itself: How Programmers Really Look at Pull RequestsSEIS
Software Engineering in Society
Denae Ford Microsoft Research, Mahnaz (Mana) Behroozi NCSU, Alexander Serebrenik Eindhoven University of Technology, Chris Parnin NCSU
Pre-print
15:00
10m
Talk
Architecture Design Decision Maps for Software SustainabilitySEIS
Software Engineering in Society
Patricia Lago Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Pre-print
15:10
20m
Talk
Discussion PeriodSEIS
Software Engineering in Society