Industrial and OSS developers’ profiles: a family of experiments to evaluate a pioneering neuro-linguistic method for preferred representational systems automatic detection

Software projects use mailing lists as the primary tool for collaboration and coordination. Mailing lists can be an important source for extracting behavioral patterns in the software development. A new approach for that is the use of Neurolinguistic theory to determine what is the Preferred Representational cognitive System (PRS) of software engineers in that specific context. Different resources and cognitive channels are used by developers in order to achieve software understanding. An important question on this matter is: What types of representational systems are preferred by software engineers? This paper presents a psychometrically based neurolinguistic method to identify the PRS of software developers. Experimental evaluation of the approach was carried out in three experiments to assess the Preferred Representational System of developers at Industrial and OSS (Apache server and Postgresql) mailing lists. For the OSS projects, the results showed that the PRS scores of the top-committers clearly differ from the general population of the projects. For industry, the experiment showed that the developers indeed have a PRS. Finally, for both scenarios, the qualitative analysis also indicated that the PRS scores obtained are aligned with the developers’ profiles, considering that alignment is essential to effective communication within the team and enhances the development process due to a better software comprehension.