A Preliminary Analysis on the Effects of Propensity to Trust in Distributed Software Development

Establishing trust between developers working atdistant sites facilitates team collaboration in distributed software development. While previous research has focused on how to build and spread trust in absence of direct, face-to-face communication, it has overlooked the effects of the propensity to trust, i.e., the trait of personality representing the individual disposition to perceive the others as trustworthy. In this study, we present a preliminary, quantitative analysis on how the propensity to trust affects the success of collaborations in a distributed project, where thesuccess is represented by pull requests whose code changes and contributions are successfully merged in the project's repository.