A Preliminary Analysis on the Effects of Propensity to Trust in Distributed Software Development
This addresses the problem of overlooked personality traits in trust-building for distributed software teams, though it is incremental as it builds on prior trust research.
The study investigated how developers' inherent trust propensity influences collaboration success in distributed software projects, finding that higher trust propensity correlates with more successful pull request merges.
Establishing trust between developers working at distant sites facilitates team collaboration in distributed software development. While previous research has focused on how to build and spread trust in absence of direct, face-to-face communication, it has overlooked the effects of the propensity to trust, i.e., the trait of personality representing the individual disposition to perceive the others as trustworthy. In this study, we present a preliminary, quantitative analysis on how the propensity to trust affects the success of collaborations in a distributed project, where the success is represented by pull requests whose code changes and contributions are successfully merged into the project's repository.