  There is a growing belief that understanding and addressing the human
processes employed during software development is likely to provide
substantially more value to industry than yet more recommendations for the
implementation of various methods and tools. To this end, considerable research
effort has been dedicated to studying human issues as represented in software
artifacts, due to its relatively unobtrusive nature. We have followed this line
of research and have conducted a preliminary study of team behaviors using data
mining techniques and linguistic analysis. Our data source, the IBM Rational
Jazz repository, was mined and data from three different project areas were
extracted. Communications in these projects were then analyzed using the LIWC
linguistic analysis tool. We found that although there are some variations in
language use among teams working on project areas dedicated to different
software outcomes, project type and the mix of (and number of) individuals
involved did not affect team behaviors as evident in their communications.
These assessments are initial conjectures, however; we plan further exploratory
analysis to validate these results. We explain these findings and discuss their
implications for software engineering practice.
