arXiv subjects

Miikka Kuutila

Publications and source records attributed to Miikka Kuutila.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Do Programmers Work at Night or During the Weekend?

Abnormal working hours can reduce work health, general well-being, and productivity, independent from a profession. To inform future approaches for automatic stress and overload detection, this paper establishes empirically collected measures of the work patterns of software engineers. To this aim, we perform the first large-scale study of software engineers' working hours by investigating the time stamps of commit activities of 86 large open source software projects, both containing hired and volunteer developers. We find that two thirds of software engineers mainly follow typical office hours, empirically established to be from 10h to 18h, and do not usually work during nights and weekends. Large variations between projects and individuals exist. Surprisingly, we found no support that project maturation would decrease abnormal working hours. In the Firefox case study, we found that hired developers work more during office hours while seniority, either in terms of number of commits or job status, did not impact working hours. We conclude that the use of working hours or timestamps of work products for stress detection requires establishing baselines at the level of individuals.

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arXiv2017

The Evolution of Sentiment Analysis - A Review of Research Topics, Venues, and Top Cited Papers

Sentiment analysis is one of the fastest growing research areas in computer science, making it challenging to keep track of all the activities in the area. We present a computer-assisted literature review, where we utilize both text mining and qualitative coding, and analyze 6,996 papers from Scopus. We find that the roots of sentiment analysis are in the studies on public opinion analysis at the beginning of 20th century and in the text subjectivity analysis performed by the computational linguistics community in 1990's. However, the outbreak of computer-based sentiment analysis only occurred with the availability of subjective texts on the Web. Consequently, 99% of the papers have been published after 2004. Sentiment analysis papers are scattered to multiple publication venues, and the combined number of papers in the top-15 venues only represent ca. 30% of the papers in total. We present the top-20 cited papers from Google Scholar and Scopus and a taxonomy of research topics. In recent years, sentiment analysis has shifted from analyzing online product reviews to social media texts from Twitter and Facebook. Many topics beyond product reviews like stock markets, elections, disasters, medicine, software engineering and cyberbullying extend the utilization of sentiment analysis

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arXiv2017

Abnormal Working Hours: Effect of Rapid Releases and Implications to Work Content

During the past years, overload at work leading to psychological diseases, such as burnouts, have drawn more public attention. This paper is a preliminary step toward an analysis of the work patterns and possible indicators of overload and time pressure on software developers with mining software repositories approach. We explore the working pattern of developers in the context of Mozilla Firefox, a large and long-lived open source project. To that end we investigate the impact of the move from traditional to rapid release cycle on work pattern. Moreover we compare Mozilla Firefox work pattern with another Mozilla product, Firefox OS, which has a different release cycle than Firefox. We find that both projects exhibit healthy working patterns, i.e. lower activity during the weekends and outside of office hours. Firefox experiences proportionally more activity on weekends than Firefox OS (Cohen's d = 0.94). We find that switching to rapid releases has reduced weekend work (Cohen's d = 1.43) and working during the night (Cohen's d = 0.45). This result holds even when we limit the analyzes on the hired resources, i.e. considering only individuals with Mozilla foundation email address, although, the effect sizes are smaller for weekends (Cohen's d = 0.64) and nights (Cohen's d = 0.23). Moreover, we use dissimilarity word clouds and find that work during the weekend is more technical while work during the week expresses more positive sentiment with words like "good" and "nice". Our results suggest that moving to rapid releases have positive impact on the work health and work-life-balance of software engineers. However, caution is needed as our results are based on a limited set of quantitative data from a single organization.

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arXiv2017

Bootstrapping a Lexicon for Emotional Arousal in Software Engineering

Emotional arousal increases activation and performance but may also lead to burnout in software development. We present the first version of a Software Engineering Arousal lexicon (SEA) that is specifically designed to address the problem of emotional arousal in the software developer ecosystem. SEA is built using a bootstrapping approach that combines word embedding model trained on issue-tracking data and manual scoring of items in the lexicon. We show that our lexicon is able to differentiate between issue priorities, which are a source of emotional activation and then act as a proxy for arousal. The best performance is obtained by combining SEA (428 words) with a previously created general purpose lexicon by Warriner et al. (13,915 words) and it achieves Cohen's d effect sizes up to 0.5.

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arXiv2017

Reviewing Literature on Time Pressure in Software Engineering and Related Professions - Computer Assisted Interdisciplinary Literature Review

During the past years, psychological diseases related to unhealthy work environments, such as burnouts, have drawn more and more public attention. One of the known causes of these affective problems is time pressure. In order to form a theoretical background for time pressure detection in software repositories, this paper combines interdisciplinary knowledge by analyzing 1270 papers found on Scopus database and containing terms related to time pressure. By clustering those papers based on their abstract, we show that time pressure has been widely studied across different fields, but relatively little in software engineering. From a literature review of the most relevant papers, we infer a list of testable hypotheses that we want to verify in future studies in order to assess the impact of time pressures on software developers mental health.

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arXiv2016

Benchmarking Web-testing - Selenium versus Watir and the Choice of Programming Language and Browser

Context: Selenium is claimed to be the most popular software test automation tool. Past academic works have mainly neglected testing tools in favor of more methodological topics. Objective: We investigated the performance of web-testing tools, to provide empirical evidence supporting choices in software test tool selection and configuration. Method: We used 4*5 factorial design to study 20 different configurations for testing a web-store. We studied 5 programming language bindings (C#, Java, Python, and Ruby for Selenium, while Watir supports Ruby only) and 4 browsers (Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera). Performance was measured with execution time, memory usage, length of the test scripts and stability of the tests. Results: Considering all measures the best configuration was Selenium with Python language binding for Chrome. Selenium with Python bindings was the best option for all browsers. The effect size of the difference between the slowest and fastest configuration was very high (Cohens d=41.5, 91% increase in execution time). Overall Internet Explorer was the fastest browser while having the worst results in the stability. Conclusions: We recommend benchmarking tools before adopting them. Weighting of factors, e.g. how much test stability is one willing to sacrifice for faster performance, affects the decision.

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