Social debt analytics for improving the management of software evolution tasks

The success of software engineering projects is in a large part dependent on social and organization aspects of the development community. Indeed, it not only depends on the complexity of the product or the number of requirements to be implemented, but also on people, processes, and how they impact the technical side of software development. Social debt represents patterns across the organizational structure around a software system that may lead to additional unforeseen project costs. Condescending behavior, disgruntlement or rage quitting are just some examples of social issues that may occur among the developers of a software project. While the research community has recently investigated the underlying dynamics leading to the introduction of social debt (e.g., the so-called “community smells” which represent symptoms of the presence of social problems in a community), as well as how such debt can be payed off, there is still a noticeable lack of empirical evidence on how social debt impacts software maintenance and evolution. In this paper, we present our position on how social debt can impacts technical aspects of source code by presenting a road map toward a deeper understanding of such relationship.