Software development is de facto a social activity that often involves people from all places to join forces globally. In such common instances, project managers must face social challenges, e.g., personality conflicts and language barriers, which often amount literally to “culture shock”. In this paper, we seek to analyze and illustrate how cultural and geographical dispersion—that is, how much a community is diverse in terms of its members’ cultural attitudes and geographical collocation—influence the emergence of collaboration and communication problems in open-source communities, a.k.a. community smells, the socio-technical precursors of unforeseen, often nasty organizational conditions amounting collectively to the phenomenon called social debt. We perform an extensive empirical study on cultural characteristics of GitHub developers, and build a regression model relating the two types of dispersion—cultural and geographical—with the emergence of four types of community smells, i.e., Organizational Silo, Lone Wolf, Radio Silence, and Black Cloud. Results indicate that cultural and geographical factors influence collaboration and communication within open-source communities, to an extent which incites—or even more interestingly mitigates, in some cases—community smells, e.g., Lone Wolf, in development teams. Managers can use these findings to address their own organizational structure and tentatively diagnose any nasty phenomena related to the conditions under study.

Test smells represent sub-optimal design or implementation solutions applied when developing test cases. Previous research has shown that these smells may decrease both maintainability and effectiveness of tests and, as such, researchers have been devising methods to automatically detect them. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of tools that developers can use within their integrated development environment to identify test smells and refactor them. In this paper, we present DARTS (Detection And Refactoring of Test Smells), an Intellij plug-in which (1) implements a state-of-the-art detection mechanism to detect instances of three test smell types, ie, General Fixture, Eager Test, and Lack of Cohesion of Test Methods, at commit-level and (2) enables their automated refactoring through the integrated APIs provided by Intellij.