OSS developers context-specific Preferred Representational systems: A initial Neurolinguistic text analysis of the Apache mailing list

Open Source Software (OSS) mailing lists are used by developers to discuss software engineering tasks performed in the project. In the last years, researchers have been conducting mailing lists linguistic analyses for understanding the intricacies of OSS development. An unpublished approach for that is to use NeuroLinguistic Theory (NT). NT postulates the use of a Preferred Representational cognitive System (PRS) in specific contexts. This means that different resources and cognitive channels are used by developers in order to understand software, but what types of representational systems are the preferred by software engineers? This paper introduces a psychometrically-based neuro-linguistic analysis tool to classify developers, and presents early results of an experiment to assess the PRS of four top developers against a baseline of the Apache server mailing list.