on the personality traits of stackoverflow users

29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Blerina Bazelli, Abram Hindle, Eleni StrouliaDepartment of Computing Science

University of Alberta, Canada

“On the Personality Traits of StackOverflow Users”

29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Question and Answer (Q&A) Websites

2008 - 2012

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29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Research Questions

RQ1: Do the top reputed authors’ personality types differ?

RQ2: Do author personalities vary by reputation?

RQ3: Do authors of posts belonging to the same topics share similar personality types?

RQ4: Do personality traits have an impact on the process of up-voting/down-voting posts?

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29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Aug. 2008 – Aug. 2012~10 million StackOverflow posts

Data Collection

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29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

“Big Five Personality Traits”

29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

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Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)

LIWC Dimension Your Data Personal Texts Formal Texts

Self-references 7.50 11.4 4.2

Social words 10.00 9.5 8.0

Positive Emotions 5.00 2.7 2.7

Negative emotions 0.00 2.6 1.6

Cognitive words 22.50 7.8 5.4

Articles 2.50 6.0 7.2

Big words 27.50 13.1 19.6

… … … …

Dictionary of 2700 English words70 Distinct Dimensions (e.g., positive emotions)

“I tried to understand the utility of backbone.js from its site, but I still couldn't figure out much. Can anybody help me by explaining how it works and how could it be helpful in writing better JavaScript?”

Example

I, me, mine

talk, together

love, sweet

hate, dislike

think, believe, could

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29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Preprocessing-Discard code snippets-Remove HTML tags

Methodology

StackOverflow

Posts LIWC Personality traits’

values

H0: The means are equal

H1: The means are not equal

ANOVAH0

H1Tukey’s HSD

The authors share similar personality traits

Authors who share similar personality traits

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RQ1: Do the top reputed authors’ personality types differ?Results -1-

Com

bina

tions

of A

utho

rs

95% Confidence Intervals of difference of means8/15

29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

RQ2: Do author personalities vary by reputation?

Results -2-

95% Confidence Intervals of difference of means

Top vs.

Medium vs.

Medium

Low

Low

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29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

RQ2: Do author personalities vary by reputation?

Results -2-

0+-

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29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

RQ2: Do author personalities vary by reputation?

Results -2-

95% Confidence Intervals of difference of means

Top vs.

Medium vs.

Medium

Low

Low

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RQ3: Do authors of posts belonging to the same topics share similar personality types?

Results -3-

C# vs.

Android vs.

Java vs.

PHP

95% Confidence Intervals of difference of means

Android

Java

JavaScript

PHP

Java

JavaScript

PHP

JavaScriptPHP

JavaScript vs.

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RQ4: Do personality traits have an impact on the process of up-voting/down-voting posts?

Results -4-

Down-voted vs. Up-voted questions

Down-voted vs. Up-voted answers

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29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Conclusions

By using the LIWC text analysis tool we were able to explore the personality traits of StackOverflow authors and answer our research questions

These results could assist managers while hiring programmers who can ask and answer questions effectively

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29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance 22 - 28 September 2013 - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Thank you for your attention!