Gender Diversity and Community Smells: A Double-Replication Study on Brazilian Software Teams

Social debts in software teams are gaining increasing attention from the research community due to their potential adverse effects on software quality. For instance, community smells are indicators of sub-optimal organizational structures and may well lead to the emergence of social debt. Previous studies analyzed which factors influence the emergence/mitigation of such smells. In particular, studies by Catolino et al. showed how factors related to team composition, particularly gender diversity, correlated to the mitigation of community smells. However, a confirmation survey on 60 practitioners suggested that these results were not aligned with the experts' perceptions. In a separate survey, Catolino et al. collected the most common team refactoring strategies for those community smells. In this work we replicate two studies by those authors, focusing on the Brazilian software teams; culture-specific expectations on the behavior of people of different genders might have affected the perception of the importance of gender diversity and refactoring strategies when mitigating community smells. We translated the survey instrument used by Catolino et al. to Brazilian Portuguese and recruited 184 Brazilian developers. Re-sults did not show significant differences from the original study; indeed, participants perceived gender diversity as less valuable to mitigate community smells than such factors like experience or team size. Additionally, we performed a qualitative analysis of an open question within the questionnaire for the refactoring strategies. Brazilian developers agree with the original studies for most smells, mainly promoting restructuring communities, creating a communication plan and mentoring. We believe these results provide further evidence on the problem and its implications when managing software teams, avoiding technical debt and maintenance issues due to team communication and coordination problems.