Community smells—The sources of social debt: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Social debt describes the accumulation of unforeseen project costs (or potential costs) from sub-optimal software development processes. Community smells are sociotechnical anti-patterns and one source of social debt. Because community smells impact software teams, development processes, outcomes, and organizations, we to understand their impact on software engineering. To provide an overview of community smells in social debt, based on published literature, and describe future research. We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify properties, understand origins and evolution, and describe the emergence of community smells. This SLR explains the impact of community smells on teamwork and team performance. We include 25 studies. Social debt describes the impacts of poor socio-technical decisions on work environments, people, software products, and society. For each of the 30 community smells identified as sources of social debt, we provide a detailed description, management approaches, organizational strategies, and mitigation effectiveness. We identify five groups of management approaches: organizational strategies, frameworks, models, tools, and guidelines. We describe 11 common properties of community smells. We develop the Community Smell Stages Framework to concisely describe the origin and evolution of community smells. We then describe the causes and effects for each community smell. We identify and describe 8 types of causes and 11 types of effects related to the community smells. Finally, we provide 8 comprehensive Sankey diagrams that offer insights into threats the community smells pose to teamwork factors and team performance. Community smells explain the influence work conditions have on software developers. The literature is scarce and focuses on a small number of community smells. Thus, the community smells still need more research. This review helps by organizing the state of the art about community smells. Our contributions provide motivations for future research and provide educational material for software engineering professionals.