Exploring Community Smells in Open-Source: An Automated Approach

Software engineering is now more than ever a community effort. Its success often weighs on balancing distance, culture, global engineering practices and more. In this scenario many unforeseen socio-technical events may result into additional project cost or “social” debt, e.g., sudden, collective employee turnover. With industrial research we discovered
community smells
, that is, sub-optimal patterns across the organisational and social structure in a software development community that are precursors of such nasty socio-technical events. To understand the impact of community smells at large, in this paper we first introduce
CodeFace4Smells
, an automated approach able to identify four community smell types that reflect socio-technical issues that have been shown to be detrimental both the software engineering and organisational research fields. Then, we perform a large-scale empirical study involving over 100 years worth of releases and communication structures data of 60 open-source communities: we evaluate (i) their diffuseness, i.e., how much are they distributed in open-source, (ii) how developers perceive them, to understand whether practitioners recognize their presence and their negative effects in practice, and (iii) how community smells relate to existing socio-technical factors, with the aim of assessing the inter-relations between them. The key findings of our study highlight that community smells are highly diffused in open-source and are perceived by developers as relevant problems for the evolution of software communities. Moreover, a number of state-of-the-art socio-technical indicators (e.g., socio-technical congruence) can be used to monitor how healthy a community is and possibly avoid the emergence of social debt.