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A Neurolinguistic Method for Identifying OSS Developers’ Context-Specific Preferred Representational Systems

Authors:
Methanias Colaço Júnior
Manoel Mendonça
Mario Farias
Paulo Henrique
Daniela Corumba

Keywords: open source; text mining; neurolinguistic; mental imagery; experimental software engineering

Abstract:
Open Source Software (OSS) projects use mailing lists as the primary tool for collaboration and coordination. Mailing lists can be an important source for extracting behavioral patterns in the OSS development. A new approach for that is the use of NeuroLinguistic theory to determine what is the Preferred Representational cognitive System (PRS) of software engineers in that specific context. Different resources and cognitive channels are used by developers in order to achieve software understanding. An important question on this matter is: What types of representational systems are preferred by software engineers? This paper presents a psychometrically-based neurolinguistic method to identify the PRS of software developers. Experimental evaluation of the approach is carried out in an experiment to assess the Preferred Representational System of top developers at Apache server and Postgresql mailing lists. The results showed that the PRS scores of the top-committers clearly differ from the general population of the projects. Qualitative analysis also indicated that the PRS scores obtained are aligned with the top committer’s profiles.

Pages: 112 to 121

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: November 18, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-230-1

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from November 18, 2012 to November 23, 2012