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

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 collaboration and productivity among developers. In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study aimed at investigating the link between team diver- sity (i.e., gender, nationality) and productivity (issue fixing time). 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 show that higher gender diversity is linked with a lower team average issue fixing time and that nationality diversity is linked with lower team politeness.