What Affects Team Behavior? Preliminary Linguistic Analysis of Communications in the Jazz Repository

TL;DR

This study uses linguistic analysis of communication data from the Jazz repository to explore how team behaviors vary across projects, revealing some language differences but no impact from project type or team size.

Contribution

It introduces a preliminary linguistic analysis approach to studying team behavior in software development using data mining and LIWC analysis on the Jazz repository.

Findings

Language use varies among teams working on different software outcomes.

Project type and team size do not significantly influence communication patterns.

Initial results suggest certain linguistic features correlate with team behaviors.

Abstract

There is a growing belief that understanding and addressing the human processes employed during software development is likely to provide substantially more value to industry than yet more recommendations for the implementation of various methods and tools. To this end, considerable research effort has been dedicated to studying human issues as represented in software artifacts, due to its relatively unobtrusive nature. We have followed this line of research and have conducted a preliminary study of team behaviors using data mining techniques and linguistic analysis. Our data source, the IBM Rational Jazz repository, was mined and data from three different project areas were extracted. Communications in these projects were then analyzed using the LIWC linguistic analysis tool. We found that although there are some variations in language use among teams working on project areas dedicated to different software outcomes, project type and the mix of (and number of) individuals involved did not affect team behaviors as evident in their communications. These assessments are initial conjectures, however; we plan further exploratory analysis to validate these results. We explain these findings and discuss their implications for software engineering practice.