Toward a User Driven Innovation for Distributed Software Teams

Abstract

The software industry has emerged to include some of the most revolutionized distributed work groups; however, not all such groups achieve their set goals and some even fail miserably. The distributed nature of open source software project teams provides an intriguing context for the study of distributed coordination. OSS team structures have traditionally been geographically dispersed and, therefore, the coordination of post-release activities such as testing are made difficult due to the fact that the only means of communication is via electronic forms, such as e-mail or message boards and forums. Nevertheless, large scale, complex, and innovative software packages have been the fruits of labor for some OSS teams set in such coordination-unfriendly environments, while others end in flames. Why are some distributed work groups more effective than others? In our current communication-enriched environment, best practices for coordination are adopted by all software projects yet some still fall by the wayside. Does the team structure have bearing on the success of the project? How does the communication between the team and external parties affect the project’s ultimate success or failure? In this study, we seek to answer these questions by applying existing theories from social networks and their analytical methods in the coordination of defect management activities found in OSS projects. We propose the social network based theoretical model for exploring distributed coordination structures and apply that for the case of the OSS defect management process for exploring the structural properties, which induce the greatest coordination performance. The outcome suggests that there is correlation between certain network measures such as density, centrality, and betweenness and coordination performance measures of defect management systems such as quality and timeliness.