TY - GEN
T1 - Penalty policies in professional software development practice
T2 - 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2010
AU - Wang, Yi
AU - Zhang, Min
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Organizational Punishment/Penalty is a pervasive phenomenon in many professional organizations. In some software development organizations, punishment measures have been adopted in an attempt to improve software developers' performance, reduce the software defects, and hence ensure software quality. It is unclear whether these measures are effective. This article presents the results of a multi-method field study that analyzes software engineers' perception towards penalty policies in relation to software quality in a software development process. The results were generated via both qualitative and quantitative methods. Through interviews, we collected the individuals' perception towards the penalty policy. By extracting data in a software configuration management system, we identified several patterns of defects change. We found that while a penalty mechanism does help to reduce software defects in daily coding activity, it fails in achieving programmers' maximum work potential. Meanwhile, experienced software programmers require less time to adapt to penalty policies and benefit from exist of less experienced developers. Some additional findings and implications are also discussed.
AB - Organizational Punishment/Penalty is a pervasive phenomenon in many professional organizations. In some software development organizations, punishment measures have been adopted in an attempt to improve software developers' performance, reduce the software defects, and hence ensure software quality. It is unclear whether these measures are effective. This article presents the results of a multi-method field study that analyzes software engineers' perception towards penalty policies in relation to software quality in a software development process. The results were generated via both qualitative and quantitative methods. Through interviews, we collected the individuals' perception towards the penalty policy. By extracting data in a software configuration management system, we identified several patterns of defects change. We found that while a penalty mechanism does help to reduce software defects in daily coding activity, it fails in achieving programmers' maximum work potential. Meanwhile, experienced software programmers require less time to adapt to penalty policies and benefit from exist of less experienced developers. Some additional findings and implications are also discussed.
KW - penalty policies
KW - perception and performance of software developers
KW - software defects
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/77954701421
U2 - 10.1145/1810295.1810302
DO - 10.1145/1810295.1810302
M3 - 会议稿件
AN - SCOPUS:77954701421
SN - 9781605587196
T3 - Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
SP - 39
EP - 47
BT - ICSE 2010 - Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering
Y2 - 1 May 2010 through 8 May 2010
ER -