arXiv subjects

Anita Sarma

Publications and source records attributed to Anita Sarma.

50 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

A Model for Understanding and Reducing Developer Burnout

Job burnout is a type of work-related stress associated with a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity. Burnt out can affect one's physical and mental health and has become a leading industry concern and can result in high workforce turnover. Through an empirical study at Globant, a large multi-national company, we created a theoretical model to evaluate the complex interplay among organizational culture, work satisfaction, and team climate, and how they impact developer burnout. We conducted a survey of developers in software delivery teams (n=3281) to test our model and analyzed the data using structural equation modeling, moderation, and multi-group analysis. Our results show that Organizational Culture, Climate for Learning, Sense of Belonging, and Inclusiveness are positively associated with Work Satisfaction, which in turn is associated with Reduced Burnout. Our model generated through a large-scale survey can guide organizations in how to reduce workforce burnout by creating a climate for learning, inclusiveness in teams, and a generative organizational culture where new ideas are welcome, information is actively sought and bad news can be shared without fear.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Perceptions of the State of D&I and D&I Initiative in the ASF

Open Source Software (OSS) Foundations and projects are investing in creating Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiatives. However, little is known about contributors' perceptions about the usefulness and success of such initiatives. We aim to close this gap by investigating how contributors perceive the state of D&I in their community. In collaboration with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), we surveyed 600+ OSS contributors and conducted 11 follow-up interviews. We used mixed methods to analyze our data-quantitative analysis of Likert-scale questions and qualitative analysis of open-ended survey question and the interviews to understand contributors' perceptions and critiques of the D&I initiative and how to improve it. Our results indicate that the ASF contributors felt that the state of D&I was still lacking, especially regarding gender, seniority, and English proficiency. Regarding the D&I initiative, some participants felt that the effort was unnecessary, while others agreed with the effort but critiqued its implementation. These findings show that D&I initiatives in OSS communities are a good start, but there is room for improvements. Our results can inspire the creation of new and the refinement of current initiatives.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

How to Debug Inclusivity Bugs? A Debugging Process with Information Architecture

Although some previous research has found ways to find inclusivity bugs (biases in software that introduce inequities), little attention has been paid to how to go about fixing such bugs. Without a process to move from finding to fixing, acting upon such findings is an ad-hoc activity, at the mercy of the skills of each individual developer. To address this gap, we created Why/Where/Fix, a systematic inclusivity debugging process whose inclusivity fault localization harnesses Information Architecture(IA) -- the way user-facing information is organized, structured and labeled. We then conducted a multi-stage qualitative empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of Why/Where/Fix, using an Open Source Software (OSS) project's infrastructure as our setting. In our study, the OSS project team used the Why/Where/Fix process to find inclusivity bugs, localize the IA faults behind them, and then fix the IA to remove the inclusivity bugs they had found. Our results showed that using Why/Where/Fix reduced the number of inclusivity bugs that OSS newcomer participants experienced by 90%.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Attracting and Retaining OSS Contributors with a Maintainer Dashboard

Tools and artifacts produced by open source software (OSS) have been woven into the foundation of the technology industry. To keep this foundation intact, the open source community needs to actively invest in sustainable approaches to bring in new contributors and nurture existing ones. We take a first step at this by collaboratively designing a maintainer dashboard that provides recommendations on how to attract and retain open source contributors. For example, by highlighting project goals (e.g., a social good cause) to attract diverse contributors and mechanisms to acknowledge (e.g., a "rising contributor" badge) existing contributors. Next, we conduct a project-specific evaluation with maintainers to better understand use cases in which this tool will be most helpful at supporting their plans for growth. From analyzing feedback, we find recommendations to be useful at signaling projects as welcoming and providing gentle nudges for maintainers to proactively recognize emerging contributors. However, there are complexities to consider when designing recommendations such as the project current development state (e.g., deadlines, milestones, refactoring) and governance model. Finally, we distill our findings to share what the future of recommendations in open source looks like and how to make these recommendations most meaningful over time.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Intersectionality Goes Analytical: Taming Combinatorial Explosion Through Type Abstraction

HCI researchers' and practitioners' awareness of intersectionality has been expanding, producing knowledge, recommendations, and prototypes for supporting intersectional populations. However, doing intersectional HCI work is uniquely expensive: it leads to a combinatorial explosion of empirical work (expense 1), and little of the work on one intersectional population can be leveraged to serve another (expense 2). In this paper, we explain how representations employed by certain analytical design methods correspond to type abstractions, and use that correspondence to identify a (de)compositional model in which a population's diverse identity properties can be joined and split. We formally prove the model's correctness, and show how it enables HCI designers to harness existing analytical HCI methods for use on new intersectional populations of interest. We illustrate through four design use-cases, how the model can reduce the amount of expense 1 and enable designers to leverage prior work to new intersectional populations, addressing expense 2.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Women's Participation in Open Source Software: A Survey of the Literature

Participation of women in Open Source Software (OSS) is very unbalanced, despite various efforts to improve diversity. This is concerning not only because women do not get the chance of career and skill developments afforded by OSS, but also because OSS projects suffer from a lack of diversity of thoughts because of a lack of diversity in their projects. Studies that characterize women's participation and investigate how to attract and retain women are spread across multiple fields, including information systems, software engineering, and social science. This paper systematically maps, aggregates, and synthesizes the state-of-the-art on women's participation in Open Source Software. It focuses on women's representation and the demographics of women who contribute to OSS, how they contribute, the acceptance rates of their contributions, their motivations and challenges, and strategies employed by communities to attract and retain women. We identified 51 articles (published between 2005 and 2021) that investigate women's participation in OSS. According to the literature, women represent about 9.8\% of OSS contributors; most of them are recent contributors, 20-37 years old, devote less than 5h/week to OSS, and make both non-code and code contributions. Only 5\% of projects have women as core developers, and women author less than 5\% of pull-requests but have similar or even higher rates of merge acceptance than men. Besides learning new skills and altruism, reciprocity and kinship are motivations especially relevant for women but can leave if they are not compensated for their contributions. Women's challenges are mainly social, including lack of peer parity and non-inclusive communication from a toxic culture. The literature reports ten strategies, which were mapped to six of the seven challenges. Based on these results, we provide guidelines for future research and practice.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Pots of Gold at the End of the Rainbow: What is Success for Open Source Contributors?

Success in Open Source Software (OSS) is often perceived as an exclusively code-centric endeavor. This perception can exclude a variety of individuals with a diverse set of skills and backgrounds, in turn helping create the current diversity & inclusion imbalance in OSS. Because people's perspectives of success affect their personal, professional, and life choices, to be able to support a diverse class of individuals, we must first understand what OSS contributors consider successful. Thus far, research has used a uni-dimensional, code-centric lens to define success. In this paper, we challenge this status-quo and reveal the multi-faceted definition of success among OSS contributors. We do so through interviews with 27 OSS contributors who are recognized as successful in their communities, and a follow-up open survey with 193 OSS contributors. Our study provides nuanced definitions of success perceptions in OSS, which might help devise strategies to attract and retain a diverse set of contributors, helping them attain their "pots of gold at the end of the rainbow".

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Can I Solve It? Identifying APIs Required to Complete OSS Task

Open Source Software projects add labels to open issues to help contributors choose tasks. However, manually labeling issues is time-consuming and error-prone. Current automatic approaches for creating labels are mostly limited to classifying issues as a bug/non-bug. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and relevance of labeling issues with the domain of the APIs required to complete the tasks. We leverage the issues' description and the project history to build prediction models, which resulted in precision up to 82% and recall up to 97.8%. We also ran a user study (n=74) to assess these labels' relevancy to potential contributors. The results show that the labels were useful to participants in choosing tasks, and the API-domain labels were selected more often than the existing architecture-based labels. Our results can inspire the creation of tools to automatically label issues, helping developers to find tasks that better match their skills.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

The Shifting Sands of Motivation: Revisiting What Drives Contributors in Open Source

Open Source Software (OSS) has changed drastically over the last decade, with OSS projects now producing a large ecosystem of popular products, involving industry participation, and providing professional career opportunities. But our field's understanding of what motivates people to contribute to OSS is still fundamentally grounded in studies from the early 2000s. With the changed landscape of OSS, it is very likely that motivations to join OSS have also evolved. Through a survey of 242 OSS contributors, we investigate shifts in motivation from three perspectives: (1) the impact of the new OSS landscape, (2) the impact of individuals' personal growth as they become part of OSS communities, and (3) the impact of differences in individuals' demographics. Our results show that some motivations related to social aspects and reputation increased in frequency and that some intrinsic and internalized motivations, such as learning and intellectual stimulation, are still highly relevant. We also found that contributing to OSS often transforms extrinsic motivations to intrinsic, and that while experienced contributors often shift toward altruism, novices often shift toward career, fun, kinship, and learning. OSS projects can leverage our results to revisit current strategies to attract and retain contributors, and researchers and tool builders can better support the design of new studies and tools to engage and support OSS development.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

If This Context Then That Concern: Exploring users' concerns with IFTTT applets

End users are increasingly using trigger-action platforms like, If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) to create applets to connect smart home devices and services. However, there are inherent risks in using such applets -- even non-malicious ones -- as sensitive information may leak through their use in certain contexts (e.g., where the device is located, who can observe the resultant action). This work aims to understand how well end users can assess this risk. We do so by exploring users' concerns with using IFTTT applets and more importantly if and how those concerns change based on different contextual factors. Through a Mechanical Turk survey of 386 participants on 49 smart-home IFTTT applets, we found that nudging the participants to think about different usage contexts led them to think deeper about the associated risks and raise their concerns. Qualitative analysis reveals that participants had a nuanced understanding of contextual factors and how these factors could lead to leakage of sensitive data and allow unauthorized access to applets and data.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Replacements and Replaceables: Making the Case for Code Variants

There are often multiple ways to implement the same requirement in source code. Different implementation choices can result in code snippets that are similar, and have been defined in multiple ways: code clones, examples, simions and variants. Currently, there is a lack of a consistent and unambiguous definition of such types of code snippets. Here we present a characterization study of code variants - a specific type of code snippets that differ from each other by at least one desired property, within a given code context. We distinguish code variants from other types of redundancies in source code, and demonstrate the significant role that they play: about 25% to 43% of developer discussions (in a set of nine open source projects) were about variants. We characterize different types of variants based on their code context and desired properties. As a demonstration of the possible use of our characterization of code variants, we show how search results can be ranked based on a desired property (e.g., speed of execution).

cs.SE↗

arXiv2019

Engineering Gender-Inclusivity into Software: Tales from the Trenches

Although the need for gender-inclusivity in software itself is gaining attention among both SE researchers and SE practitioners, and methods have been published to help, little has been reported on how to make such methods work in real-world settings. For example, how do busy software practitioners use such methods in low-cost ways? How do they endeavor to maximize benefits from using them? How do they avoid the controversies that can arise in talking about gender? To find out how teams were handling these and similar questions, we turned to 10 real-world software teams. We present these teams experiences "in the trenches," in the form of 12 practices and 3 potential pitfalls, so as to provide their insights to other real-world software teams trying to engineer gender-inclusivity into their software products.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2019

From GenderMag to InclusiveMag: An Inclusive Design Meta-Method

How can software practitioners assess whether their software supports diverse users? Although there are empirical processes that can be used to find "inclusivity bugs" piecemeal, what is often needed is a systematic inspection method to assess soft-ware's support for diverse populations. To help fill this gap, this paper introduces InclusiveMag, a generalization of GenderMag that can be used to generate systematic inclusiveness methods for a particular dimension of diversity. We then present a multi-case study covering eight diversity dimensions, of eight teams' experiences applying InclusiveMag to eight under-served populations and their "mainstream" counterparts.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2019

Fixing Inclusivity Bugs for Information Processing Styles and Learning Styles

Most software systems today do not support cognitive diversity. Further, because of differences in problem-solving styles that cluster by gender, software that poorly supports cognitive diversity can also embed gender biases. To help software professionals fix gender bias "bugs" related to people's problem-solving styles for information processing and learning of new software we collected inclusivity fixes from three sources. The first two are empirical studies we conducted: a heuristics-driven user study and a field research industry study. The third is data that we obtained about a before/after user study of inclusivity bugs. The resulting seven potential inclusivity fixes show how to debug software to be more inclusive for diverse problem-solving styles.

cs.HC↗