on the personality traits of stackoverflow users
TRANSCRIPT
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!