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746

Title *

A Laboratory Experiment on Using Different Financial-Incentivization Schemes in Software-Engineering Experimentationuse asterix (*) to get italics

Authors *

Dmitri Bershadskyy, Jacob Krüger, Gül Çalıklı, Siegmar Otto, Sarah Zabel, Jannik Greif, Robert HeyerPlease use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"

Year *

2024

Picture

Abstract *

<p>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.</p>

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Keywords (optional)

Software-Engineering Experimentation, Financial Incentives, Experiment, Empirical Software Engineering

Methods that require specific expertise (optional)

NonePlease indicate the methods that may require specialised expertise during the peer review process (use a comma to separate various required expertises).

Thematic fields *

Computer science

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Submission date

2024-03-20 07:44:51

Recommender

Chris Chambers

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