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.
- A. L. Barabasi, H. Jeong, Z. Neda, E. Ravasz, A. Schubert, and T. Vicsek. Evolution of the social network of scientific collaborations. cond-mat/0104162, Apr. 2001.Google Scholar
- D. Barron. The analysis of count data: Overdispersion and au-tocorrelation. Sociological methodology, 22:179--220, 1992.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- C. Bird, N. Nagappan, P. Devanbu, H. Gall, and B. Murphy. Putting it All Together: Using Socio-Technical Networks to Predict Failures. In Proc. ISSRE 2009. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- C. Bird, D. Pattison, R. D'Souza, V. Filkov, and P. Devanbu. Latent social structure in open source projects. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering, SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16, page 2435, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM. ISBN 978-1-59593-995-1. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- F. P. Brooks. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition. Addison-Wesley, 1995. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- S. L. Brown and K. M. Eisenhardt. Product development: Past research, present findings, and future directions. The Academy of Management Review, 20(2):343--378, Apr. 1995. ISSN 0363-7425. doi: 10.2307/258850.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- M. Cataldo and J. D. Herbsleb. Communication networks in geographically distributed software development. In Pro-ceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, CSCW '08, page 579--588, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM. ISBN 978-1-60558-007-4. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. Cataldo, J. D. Herbsleb, and K. M. Carley. Socio-technical congruence: a framework for assessing the impact of technical and work dependencies on software development productivity. In Proc. ESEM 2008, pages 2--11. ISBN 978-1-59593-971-5. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. Cataldo, P. A. Wagstrom, J. D. Herbsleb, and K. M. Car-ley. Identification of coordination requirements: implications for the design of collaboration and awareness tools. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, CSCW '06, page 353--362, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM. ISBN 1-59593-249-6. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. Conway. Howdo committees invent? Datamation Journal, pages 28--31, April 1968.Google Scholar
- J. M. Costa, M. Cataldo, and C. R. de Souza. The scale and evolution of coordination needs in large-scale distributed projects: implications for the future generation of collaborative tools. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI '11, page 3151--3160, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-0228-9. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- C. D. Cramton. The mutual knowledge problem and its consequences for dispersed collaboration. Organization Science, 12(3):346--371, May 2001. ISSN 1526-5455. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- K. Crowston and J. Howison. The social structure of free and open source software development. First Monday, ISSN 1396-0466, Feb. 2005. The authors examine communication patters of FLOSS projects, finding that FLOSS development teams vary widely in centralizing or decentralizing their communications.Google Scholar
- J. N. Cummings. Work groups, structural diversity, and knowledge sharing in a global organization. Manage. Sci., 50(3):352--364, Mar. 2004. ISSN 0025-1909. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J. N. Cummings and R. Cross. Structural properties of work groups and their consequences for performance. Social Networks, 25(3):197-210, July 2003. ISSN 0378-8733.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- W. de Nooy, A. Mrvar, and V. Batagelj. Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek. Cambridge University Press, Jan. 2005. ISBN 0521602629. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- K. Ehrlich and M. Cataldo. All-for-one and one-for-all?: a multi-level analysis of communication patterns and individual performance in geographically distributed software development. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW '12, pages 945--954, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-1086-4. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- K. Ehrlich and K. Chang. Leveraging expertise in global software teams: Going outside boundaries. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on Global Software Engineering, ICGSE '06, page 149158, Washington, DC, USA, 2006. IEEE Computer Society. ISBN 0-7695-2663-2. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- K. Ehrlich, G. Valetto, andM. Helander. Seeing inside: Using social network analysis to understand patterns of collaboration and coordination in global software teams. In Proc. ICGSE '07, pages 297-298, 2007. ISBN 0-7695-2920-8. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- W. Fong Boh, S. A. Slaughter, and J. A. Espinosa. Learning from experience in software development: A multilevel analysis. Manage. Sci., 53(8):1315--1331, Aug. 2007. ISSN 0025-1909. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- R. Frost. Jazz and the eclipse way of collaboration. IEEE Softw., 24(6):114--117, 2007. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- R. Guimera, B. Uzzi, J. Spiro, and L. A. N. Amaral. Team assembly mechanisms determine collaboration network structure and team performance. Science (New York, N.Y.), 308 (5722):697--702, Apr. 2005. ISSN 1095-9203.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- J. D. Herbsleb and A. Mockus. An empirical study of speed and communication in globally distributed software develop-ment. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., 29:481--494, June 2003. ISSN 0098-5589. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- K. Herzig and A. Zeller. Mining the jazz repository: Challenges and opportunities. In Mining Software Repositories, 2009. MSR '09. 6th IEEE International Working Conference on, pages 159--162, May 2009. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- P. Hinds and C. McGrath. Structures that work: social struc-ture, work structure and coordination ease in geographically distributed teams. In Proc. CSCW 2006, pages 343--352. ACM, 2006. ISBN 1-59593-249-6. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- R. Kling, W. Scacchi, and M. C. Yovits. Computing as social action: The social dynamics of computing in complex organizations. volume 19, pages 249-327. Elsevier, 1980. ISBN 0065-2458.Google Scholar
- A. G. Koru and H. Liu. Building defect prediction models in practice. IEEE Softw., 22(6):2329, Nov. 2005. ISSN 0740-7459. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- R. E. Kraut and L. A. Streeter. Coordination in software development. Comm. of the ACM, 38(3):69--81, Mar. 1995. ISSN 00010782. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- I. Kwan, A. Schroter, and D. Damian. Does Socio-Technical congruence have an effect on software build success? a study of coordination in a software project. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., 37(3):307--324, May 2011. ISSN 0098-5589. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. E. J. Newman. The structure and function of complex networks. Mar. 2003. SIAM Review 45, 167--256 (2003).Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- G. L. Stewart and M. R. Barrick. Team structure and perfor-mance: Assessing the mediating role of intrateam process and the moderating role of task type. The Academy of Manage-ment Journal, 43(2):135--148, Apr. 2000. ISSN 0001-4273.Google Scholar
- B. Tabachnick and L. Fidell. Using Multivariate Statistics. Boston: Pearson Education, 2007. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- P. Wagstrom, J. Herbsleb, and K. Carley. Communication, team performance, and the individual: Bridging technical de-pendencies. Proc. AMC 2010, 2010.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- D. Watts. Networks, dynamics, and the Small-World phe-nomenon. The American Journal of Sociology, 105(2):527, 493, 1999.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- T. Wolf, T. Nguyen, and D. Damian. Does distance still matter? Softw. Process, 13(6):493--510, 2008. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- T. Wolf, A. Schroter, D. Damian, and T. Nguyen. Predict-ing build failures using social network analysis on developer communication. In Proc. ICSE 2009, pages 1--11, 2009. ISBN 978-1-4244-3453-4. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- N. Zhou, Q. Ma, and K. Ratakonda. Quantitative modeling of communication cost for global service delivery. In Proc. SCC 2009, SCC '09, pages 388--395, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7695-3811-2. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- T. Zimmermann and N. Nagappan. Predicting defects with program dependencies. In Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, 2009. ESEM 2009. 3rd International Symposium on, pages 435--438, Oct. 2009. Google Scholar
Digital Library
Index Terms
Talk versus work: characteristics of developer collaboration on the jazz platform
Recommendations
Talk versus work: characteristics of developer collaboration on the jazz platform
OOPSLA '12: Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applicationsIBM'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 ...
Evolution of developer collaboration on the jazz platform: a study of a large scale agile project
ISEC '11: Proceedings of the 4th India Software Engineering ConferenceCollaboration is a key aspect of the agile philosophy of software development. As a software system matures over iterations, trends of developer collaboration can offer valuable insights into project dynamics. In this paper, we study evolution of ...
How does developer interaction relate to software quality? an examination of product development data
AbstractIndustrial software systems are being increasingly developed by large and distributed teams. Tools like collaborative development environments (CDE) are used to facilitate interaction between members of such teams, with the expectation that social ...







Comments