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Talk versus work: characteristics of developer collaboration on the jazz platform

Published:19 October 2012Publication History
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Abstract

IBM's Jazz initiative offers a state-of-the-art collaborative development environment (CDE) facilitating developer interactions around interdependent units of work. In this paper, we analyze development data across two versions of a major IBM product developed on the Jazz platform, covering in total 19 months of development activity, including 17,000+ work items and 61,000+ comments made by more than 190 developers in 35 locations. By examining the relation between developer talk and work, we find evidence that developers maintain a reasonably high level of connectivity with peer developers with whom they share work dependencies, but the span of a developer's communication goes much beyond the known dependencies of his/her work items. Using multiple linear regression models, we find that the number of defects owned by a developer is impacted by the number of other developers (s)he is connected through talk, his/her interpersonal influence in the network of work dependencies, the number of work items (s)he comments on, and the number work items (s)he owns. These effects are maintained even after controlling for workload, role, work dependency, and connection related factors. We discuss the implications of our results for collaborative software development and project governance.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 47, Issue 10
      OOPSLA '12
      October 2012
      1011 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/2398857
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        OOPSLA '12: Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
        October 2012
        1052 pages
        ISBN:9781450315616
        DOI:10.1145/2384616

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      • Published: 19 October 2012

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