Success of an open source software (OSS) development community is often attributed to the underlying governance model, and a key component of this model is the decision-making process. In OSS projects, details relating to decision-making such as the decision-process that are made available to stakeholders are at times incomplete and may remain buried and hidden in large amounts of archived data. This talk aims to provide an overview of three projects that aim to unearth three facets of decision-making during the evolution of the Python language: decision-making processes, decision-rationale, and the influence of different roles on decision-making.

Bio: Associate Professor Tony Savarimuthu works in the Information Science department at the University of Otago. Tony conducts research in Software Engineering, Multi-Agent Systems and Information Systems. In Software Engineering, his works explore the role of human-centric aspects in software development such as social norms, expectation violations, decision-making processes, and detecting toxicity in project communication. His works employ data science approaches to extract insights from large software repositories such as Python development archives. A spotlight of his works can be found here - https://softwareinnovation.nz/a-spotlight-on-human-factors-research-of-assoc-prof-tony-savarimuthu/ and https://www.otago.ac.nz/info-science/people/tony-savarimuthu.html

This talk is part of the New Zealand Software Innovation Seminar (SI^NZ) Series: https://softwareinnovation.nz/seminars/

Zoom Link: https://vuw.zoom.us/my/softwareinnovationnewzealand