Different and similar perceptions of communication among software developers

Context:

Software development is a collaborative task involving different persons. Development team members are often diverse in regard to several aspects, including experience, (soft) skills, and communication habits. Different preferences in what adequate communication looks like influence how communication is perceived and interpreted by team members.

Objective:

In this paper, we investigate differences and similarities in how software developers with varying levels of experience and skills perceive statements from exemplary software project communication.

Methods:

By applying hierarchical cluster analysis on the perception data of 94 software developers, we aim to find groups of developers sharing similar perceptions towards statements from software project communication, and to identify factors that influence this perception.

Results:

We contribute the following key findings: (1) We statistically identify two groups of software developers whose perceptions differ significantly for about 65% of statements from software project communication; (2) For a logistic regression model, five polarizing statements suffice to assign each participant to their group; (3) Although there is a significant difference in the communication perception, there are no demographic characteristics that differ notably across the two groups.

Conclusion:

From our results, we conclude that different perceptions of software project communication during collaboration within development teams are a potential risk for the teams’ mood and the project success. We outline how our results can serve use cases like the application of sentiment analysis in software engineering and mindful communication in software teams in general.