A Laboratory Experiment on Using Different Financial-Incentivization Schemes in Software-Engineering Experimentation
arXiv (Cornell University)(2022)
摘要
In software-engineering research, many empirical studies are conducted with
open-source or industry developers. However, in contrast to other research
communities like economics or psychology, only few experiments use financial
incentives (i.e., paying money) as a strategy to motivate participants'
behavior and reward their performance. The most recent version of the SIGSOFT
Empirical Standards mentions payouts only for increasing participation in
surveys, but not for mimicking real-world motivations and behavior in
experiments. Within this article, we report a controlled experiment in which we
tackled this gap by studying how different financial incentivization schemes
impact developers. For this purpose, we first conducted a survey on financial
incentives used in the real-world, based on which we designed three
incentivization schemes: (1) a performance-dependent scheme that employees
prefer, (2) a scheme that is performance-independent, and (3) a scheme that
mimics open-source development. Then, using a between-subject experimental
design, we explored how these three schemes impact participants' performance.
Our findings indicate that the different schemes can impact participants'
performance in software-engineering experiments. Due to the small sample sizes,
our results are not statistically significant, but we can still observe clear
tendencies. Our contributions help understand the impact of financial
incentives on participants in experiments as well as real-world scenarios,
guiding researchers in designing experiments and organizations in compensating
developers.
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关键词
experimentation,financial-incentivization,software-engineering
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