How diverse is your team? Investigating gender and nationality diversity in GitHub teams

Background: Building an effective team of developers is a complex task faced by both software companies and open source communities. The problem of forming a “dream” team involves many variables, including consideration of human factors and it is not a dilemma solvable in a mathematical way. Empirical studies might provide interesting insights to explain which factors need to be taken into account in building a team of developers and which levers act to optimise productivity among developers. Aim: In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study aimed at investigating the link between team diversity (i.e., gender, nationality) and productivity (issue fixing time). Method: We consider issues solved from the GHTorrent dataset inferring gender and nationality of each team’s members. We also evaluate the politeness of all comments involved in issue resolution. Results: Results show that higher gender diversity is linked with a lower team average issue fixing time (higher productivity), that nationality diversity is linked with lower team politeness and that gender diversity is linked with higher sentiment.