TOAST

Team Observation And Smells Tracking Tool

🌟 Introduction

TOAST is a proof-of-concept recommendation system designed to make research on community smell symptoms practical and actionable for practitioners. Built on the Discord platform, TOAST empowers managers to:

• Conduct manual analyses using a catalog of validated symptoms
• Leverage their expertise to identify and mitigate community smells early in software development teams

🚀 Key Features

• Survey-based methodology for identifying community smells
• Interactive questionnaire for evaluating team members' behaviors
• Weighted scoring system for assessing susceptibility to various community smells
• Flexible, numerical scoring approach to accommodate diverse organizational contexts

🎯 Objectives

1. Enhance practitioners' awareness of potential issues within their teams
2. Integrate seamlessly with widely-used recommendation systems in software development environments

🏛️ Repository Structure

All the files in this repository are related to the tool source code. In the data_files directory there are the files that were used during the research project that led to the development of the tool.

Specifically, the directory contains:

• The file Selection Survey for Community Smells Recognition - Answers.xlsx that contains the answers to the exploratory survey used to find the set of managerial figures to interview
• The file An Empirical Study on Community Smells within Project Teams - Answers.xlsx that contains the answers to the two iterations of the main survey, aggregated in a single sheet
• The file analisi_rq_2.R that contains the R scripts used to calculate the metrics used to answer the second research question
• The file Coding Sheet.xlsx that contains the coding process that was followed to identify the symptoms from the literature
• The file Experiment Results.xlsx that contains the results of the experiment conducted to evaluate TOAST

🛠️ Setup Instructions

Prerequisites

• Node.js
• npm (Node Package Manager)
• Git

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/atdepo/toast-tool.git
   cd toast-tool
   

2. Install dependencies:

   npm update
   npm install
   

🤖 Creating a Discord Bot

1. Log in to your Discord account
2. Create a new Discord Application at Discord Developer Portal
3. In the Bot tab, click Add Bot
4. Get your bot token (DISCORD_TOKEN) by clicking Reset Token
5. From the OAuth2 tab, retrieve your CLIENT_ID
6. Generate an invite link for your bot:
   • Select application.commands and bot scopes
   • Choose Send Messages and Manage Messages permissions
7. Use the generated link to add the bot to your Discord server
8. Retrieve the GUILD_ID from your server (with developer mode enabled)

⚙️ Configuration

Complete the .env file in the bot's folder with the tokens you've gathered:

DISCORD_TOKEN=your_bot_token_here
CLIENT_ID=your_client_id_here
GUILD_ID=your_guild_id_here

🚀 Running the Tool

Start the tool's backend:

node toast.js

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📝 Note: Make sure to keep your bot token and other sensitive information secure. Never share them publicly or commit them to version control.