What is it about?
Software development needs both technical skills and good collaboration. When collaboration is poor, teams build up social debt—unexpected project costs caused by poor team interactions. Community smells are early signals of these problems, and most previous research detects them automatically from developers' communication data. We took a complementary approach that puts project managers at the center. Using an existing literature review and a user survey, we built a catalog of symptoms for four types of community smells, which managers can use to inspect their teams. We also developed TOAST, a tool that puts the catalog into practice, and tested it in an experiment with project managers.
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Why is it important?
The catalog helps managers notice problems at the level of individual team members, before they grow. In our experiment, even participants who did not know the term “community smells” could understand the tool's output, reflect on their team dynamics, and recognize problematic behavior patterns.
Perspectives
Most tools for community smells analyze communication data automatically. In this work, we chose a different angle: we gave project managers a catalog of symptoms they can observe directly in their teams, and a tool, TOAST, that supports them. A result I find important is that even managers who had never heard the term “community smells” could use the tool to reflect on their teams.
Prof. Stefano Lambiase
Aalborg Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Novel, Tool‐Supported Catalog of Community Smell Symptoms, Journal of Software Evolution and Process, January 2025, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/smr.70067.
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