research-article

Penalty policies in professional software development practice: a multi-method field study

Authors:

Min ZhangAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '10: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2

Pages 39 - 47

https://doi.org/10.1145/1810295.1810302

Published: 01 May 2010 Publication History

Abstract

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.

References

[1]

Channelnewsasia: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/vie w/449967/1/.html, accessed at 14th Sep. 2009.

[2]

Introduction to Curve Estimation: http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/garson/PA765/curve.htm, accessed at 14th Sep. 2009

[3]

Arvey, R. D., Davis, G. A., and Nelson, S. M. 1984 Use of discipline in an organization: A field study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 69(3): 448--460.

[4]

Ball, G. A., Treviño, L. K. and Sims, H. P. Jr. 1994 Just and unjust punishment incidents: Influences on subordinate performance and citizenship. Academy of Management Journal, 37 (2): 299--322.

[5]

Ball, G. A. and Sims, H. P. 1991 A conceptual analysis of cognition and affect in organizational punishment, Human Resource Management Review, Vol. 1, 227--243.

[6]

Baranski, B et al. 2006 High-order punishment and the evolution of cooperation. In Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation (GECCO2006). ACM, 379--380.

Digital Library

[7]

Basili, V., Shull, F., and Lanubile, F. 1999. Building Knowledge through Families of Experiments. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 25(4), pp. 456--473.

Digital Library

[8]

Butterfield, K., Treviño, L. K. & Ball, G. A. 1996. Punishment from the manager's perspective: A grounded investigation and inductive model. Academy of Management Journal, 39, pp. 1479--1512.

[9]

Butterfield, K. D., Trevino, L. K., Wade, K. J. and Ball, G. A., 2005 Organizational punishment form the manager' s perspective: An exploratory study. Journal of Managerial Issues, Vol. 17, Issue 3, pp. 363--382.

[10]

Cataldo, M., Herbsleb, J. D., Carley, K. Socio-Technical Congruence: A Framework for Assessing the Impact of Technical and Work Dependencies on Software Development Productivity, 2nd Symposium of Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, Kaiserslautern, Germany, 2008.

Digital Library

[11]

Deci, E. L. The effects of contingent and noncontingent rewards and controls on intrinsic motivation. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, Vol. 8, pp. 217--229, 1972.

[12]

Deci, E. L. and Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior, 1985.

[13]

Fenton, N. and Neil, M. 1999 A critique of software defect prediction models, IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 1--15.

Digital Library

[14]

Luthans, F., and Kreitner, R. Organizational behavior modification and beyond. Glen-view, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1985.

[15]

Keskin, H. 2009 Antecedents and consequences of team memory in software development projects. Information and management 46 (2009), pp. 388--396.

Digital Library

[16]

MacCormack, A., John Rusnak, and Carliss Y. Baldwin. 2008 The Impact of Component Modularity on Design Evolution: Evidence from the Software Industry. Harvard Business School working papers. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5831.html. accessed at 18/09/2009.

[17]

Martin, C. L., and Bies, R. J. 1991 Just laid off, but still a "good citizen"? Only if the process is fair. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Miami Beach, FL.

[18]

McGregor, D. and Cutcher-Gershenfeld, J. 2006. The Human Side of Enterprise, McGraw-Hill Skarlicki, D. P. and Kulik, C. T. Third Party Reaction to Employee (mis)Treatment: An Justice Perspective. Research in Organizational Behavior: An Annual Series of Analytical Essays and Critical Review. Vol 26. Ed. by and Barry M. Staw, Roderick Moreland Kramer. pp. 183--230. Elsevier 2005.

[19]

Patton P., and Jayaswal B. 2006 Design for Trustworthy Software: Tools, Techniques, and Methodology of Developing Robust Software. Prentice Hall.

Digital Library

[20]

Sharp, H., N. Baddoo, S. Beecham, T. Hall, and H. Robinson, 2009 Models of Motivation in Software Engineering, Information and Software Technology 51, 2009, pp. 219--233.

Digital Library

[21]

Sigmund, K., C. Hauert, and M. A. Nowak. Reward and punishment. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, volume 98, pp. 10757--10762, 2001.

[22]

Treviño, L. K. The social effects of punishment: A justice perspective, Academy of Management Review, 17: 647--676, 1992.

[23]

Treviño, L. K., & Weaver, G. R. 1998. Punishment in organizations; descriptive and normative perspectives. In M. Schminke (Ed.). Managerial ethics: Moral management of people and processes: 99--114. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

[24]

Vance Wilson, E., and James R. Connolly. Effects of group task pressure on perceptions of email and face-to-face communication effectiveness. In Proceedings of the 2001 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, pp. 270--278.

Digital Library

Cited By

BATAR MBİRANT K(2021)Data Mining based Inferences about Software ParametersYazılım Parametreleri ile ilgili Veri Madenciliğine Dayalı ÇıkarımlarALKÜ Fen Bilimleri Dergisi10.46740/alku.9858393:3(9-24)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.46740/alku.985839
BATAR MBİRANT KISIK A(2021)Software Risk Assessment and Management with Rules Based on Fuzzy ApproachDeu Muhendislik Fakultesi Fen ve Muhendislik10.21205/deufmd.202123691823:69(903-911)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.21205/deufmd.2021236918
Ghanbari HVartiainen TSiponen M(2018)Omission of Quality Software Development PracticesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/317774651:2(1-27)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3177746
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Penalty policies in professional software development practice: a multi-method field study
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
        Project staffing
        Systems development
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Collaboration in software development
      1. Programming teams

Recommendations

Software Development Worldwide: The State of the Practice

The worldwide boom in IT use has spurred software development efforts around the globe. The authors' research program focuses on collecting quantitative data about several countries' current practices and performance, their adoption of competing models ...
"Leagile" software development

In recent years there has been a noticeable shift in attention from those who use agile software development toward lean software development, often labelled as a shift "from agile to lean". However, the reality may not be as simple or linear as this ...
Agile software development in practice
Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming

Agile software development methods have been around since the mid 1990s. Over these years, teams have evolved the specific software development practices used. Aims: The goal of this paper is to provide a view of the agile practices used by new teams, ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '10: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2

May 2010

554 pages

ISBN:9781605587196

DOI:10.1145/1810295

General Chairs:
Jeff Kramer
Imperial College, London, UK
,
Judith Bishop
Microsoft Research, Redmond
,
Program Chairs:
Prem Devanbu
University of California at Davis
,
Sebastian Uchitel
University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Imperial College London, UK

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 May 2010

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ICSE '10

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ICSE '10: 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering

May 1 - 8, 2010

Cape Town, South Africa

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
341
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)7
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 13 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

BATAR MBİRANT K(2021)Data Mining based Inferences about Software ParametersYazılım Parametreleri ile ilgili Veri Madenciliğine Dayalı ÇıkarımlarALKÜ Fen Bilimleri Dergisi10.46740/alku.9858393:3(9-24)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.46740/alku.985839
BATAR MBİRANT KISIK A(2021)Software Risk Assessment and Management with Rules Based on Fuzzy ApproachDeu Muhendislik Fakultesi Fen ve Muhendislik10.21205/deufmd.202123691823:69(903-911)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.21205/deufmd.2021236918
Ghanbari HVartiainen TSiponen M(2018)Omission of Quality Software Development PracticesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/317774651:2(1-27)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3177746
Wang YRedmiles D(2018)Cheap talk, cooperation, and trust in global software engineeringEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-015-9407-321:6(2233-2267)Online publication date: 26-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-015-9407-3
Jia JZhang PCapretz L(2016)Environmental factors influencing individual decision-making behavior in software projectsProceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/2897586.2897589(86-92)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2897586.2897589

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents