ICIS 2016 Dublin formative and summative feedback in solution generation: The role of community and decision support system in open source software

Feedback may seek to improve a solution, known as formative feedback, or to measure the level of success of the solution, known as summative feedback. Formative feedback is an important aspect of solution generation. This article decomposes formative feedback in four components based on learning literature: likability of feedback, verification feedback, specific elaborated feedback, and general elaborated feedback. However, formative feedback may have different effect in the solver depending in his state of anxiety. In addition, the solver receives formative feedback from the community and summative feedback from DSS. A negative summative feedback from DSS induces anxiety to the solver. Feedback literature not distinguishes between formative or summative feedback, which could explain the contradictory findings. This research theorizes about how summative feedback modifies formative feedback based on ACT. This analysis was performed by using an OSS community, which produced 976,635 lines of code in 36,878 solutions for 5,108 problems. The results suggest that summative feedback modifies how formative feedback affects the solver. Implications for the solution generation, We-intentions, formative and summative feedback are drawn.