On the detection of community smells using genetic programming-based ensemble classifier chain

Abstract

Community smells are symptoms of organizational and social issues within the software development community that often increase the project costs and impact software quality. Recent studies have identified a variety of community smells and defined them as suboptimal patterns connected to organizational-social structures in the software development community such as the lack of communication, coordination and collaboration. Recognizing the advantages of the early detection of potential community smells in a software project, we introduce a novel approach that learns from various community organizational and social practices to provide an automated support for detecting community smells. In particular, our approach learns from a set of interleaving organizational-social symptoms that characterize the existence of community smell instances in a software project. We build a multi-label learning model to detect 8 common types of community smells. We use the ensemble classifier chain (ECC) model that transforms multi-label problems into several single-label problems which are solved using genetic programming (GP) to find the optimal detection rules for each smell type. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we conducted an empirical study on a benchmark of 103 open source projects and 407 community smell instances. The statistical tests of our results show that our approach can detect the eight considered smell types with an average F-measure of 89% achieving a better performance compared to different state-of-the-art techniques. Furthermore, we found that the most influential factors that best characterize community smells include the social network density and closeness centrality as well as the standard deviation of the number of developers per time zone and per community.