Software Development Performance Research Articles

The factors that affect the performance of open source software development - the perspective of social capital and expertise integration

Drawing on social capital theory, we develop a theoretical model aiming to explore how open source software (OSS) project effectiveness (in terms of team size, team effort and team's level of completion) is affected by expertise integration. This in turn is influenced by three types of social capital - relational capital, cognitive capital and structural capital. In addition, this study also exam- ines two moderating effects - the impact of technical complexity on the relationship between cognitive capital and expertise integration, and of task inter- dependence on the relationship between expertise integration and task comple- tion. Through a field survey of 160 OSS members from five Taiwanese communities, there is support for some of the proposed hypotheses. Both reci- procity and centrality affect expertise integration as expected, but the influence of commitment and cognitive capital (including expertise and tenure) on expertise integration is not significant. Finally, expertise integration affects both team size and team effort, which in turn jointly influence task completion. This research contributes to advancing theoretical understanding of the effectiveness of free OSS development as well as providing OSS practitioners with insight into how to leverage social capital for improving the performance of OSS development.

COLLABORATION STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE IN NEW SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: FINDINGS FROM THE STUDY OF OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS

The state of software development performance is far from being exemplar, with a success rate well below that of other industries, and understanding how to improve these projects is not only substantive but urgent. Software development is at most times a collaborative effort, yet we do not understand clearly how different collaboration structures associate with development performance metrics. This paper empirically examines the association between collaboration patterns, project productivity and product quality through a field study of working software open source new product development teams, using archival data from electronic sources related to Open Source Software projects. Collaboration structures are measured using Social Network Analysis and in terms of their network density, network centralization and the level of boundary spanning activity of team members. Productivity and quality are measured using "hard", code-based metrics. Results of regression analyses testing relevant hypotheses suggest that project managers need to strongly encourage internal collaboration, but be wary of allowing team members to participate in multiple projects. The breadth of skills within the team is a tactical asset that may increase the efficient frontier in the quality–productivity trade-off. Results also show that centralized structures associate with higher product quality and development productivity.

User participation in software development projects

Introduction It is commonly acknowledged that success in IT projects is difficult to achieve. A recent industry survey observed that only 34% of IT projects were considered successful. Of the several potential factors contributing to this hard-to-achieve success, user involvement was noted as the most important one. Consistent with this notion, both researchers and practitioners have viewed user participation as an important way of improving software quality and increasing user satisfaction and acceptance. Users/customers are often encouraged to participate and directly communicate with developers in the software development process. On the other hand, empirical evidence shows that user participation in the development process can negatively influence project performance since it could make the process more difficult, lengthy, and less effective. Such contradictory findings raise the question of when user participation is actually helpful and when it might negatively impact project performance. Previous research tells only one side of the story since it has examined user participation or project performance by focusing primarily on user viewpoints. The findings give an incomplete picture since they have not thoroughly addressed developer viewpoints. Clearly, there is a need to investigate software project success from the perspective of developers given that not only are they at the core of development process but they also represent the largest single cost in software development. Developer satisfaction is imperative for systems development success. Dissatisfied developers would adversely affect the quality of software as well as the productivity of development teams. A high rate of developer turnover in projects (due to dissatisfaction) could lead to increasing costs for development firms as well as high user/customer dissatisfaction. Due to the differences in background and circumstance, developers and users often share different and sometimes conflicting interests during software development. Researchers have identified a large gap in perceptions and definitions of project success between developers and the software industry (for example, users/customers). For example, developers tend to be achievement-oriented and are intrinsically motivated to develop excellent software, while users/ customers emphasis more on meeting a schedule or maintaining a budget. Thus, the potential conflicting interests between users and developers might negatively affect the software development performance. This article addresses the question of the relative effectiveness of user participation by empirically examining the perceived software project performance (for example, satisfaction) from both user and developer perspectives simultaneously. We used survey data from 117 software development projects and 746 respondents at a large Fortune 100 manufacturing firm during a four-year time period to investigate the impact of user participation on the satisfaction of both developers and users. Our findings offer insights into the impact of user participation on generating higher levels of developer and user satisfaction and, at the same time, minimizing the perception gap between users and developers on project performance. In addition, we also study the role of software complexity (for example, whether projects involve new software development as opposed to maintenance of existing software) in user participation and its effect on satisfaction. Questionnaire data was collected from 453 software developers and 293 users/customers working on 117 software projects (for details of the data collection process, see the sidebar "How the Survey was Conducted"). The average number of developer survey respondents per project (for example, team) was four and the average number of user/customer respondents per project was three. Our analysis was performed at project level, and satisfaction scores for developers and users were averaged for each project. Of the 117 software development projects, 45 (39% of our sample) were maintenance projects and 72 (61%) were new development projects. The average software development time of the 117 software projects was 126 days. Figure 1 outlines the project characteristics in our sample. The most common business domain for our software projects was the manufacturing and supply chain (41 projects, 35%) and most of the projects were Web-based applications (78 projects, 66%).

Toward Agile: An Integrated Analysis of Quantitative and Qualitative Field Data on Software Development Agility

As business and technology environments change at an unprecedented rate, software development agility to respond to changing user requirements has become increasingly critical for software development performance. Agile software development approaches, which emphasize sense-and-respond, self-organization, cross-functional teams, and continuous adaptation, have been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to improve their software development agility. However, the agile development literature is largely anecdotal and prescriptive, lacking empirical evidence and theoretical foundation to support the principles and practices of agile development. Little research has empirically examined the software development agility construct in terms of its dimensions, determinants, and effects on software development performance. As a result, there is a lack of understanding about how organizations can effectively implement an agile development approach. Using an integrated research approach that combines quantitative and qualitative data analyses, this research opens the black box of agile development by empirically examining the relationships among two dimensions of software development agility (software team response extensiveness and software team response efficiency), two antecedents that can be controlled (team autonomy and team diversity), and three aspects of software development performance (on-time completion, on-budget completion, and software functionality). Our PLS results of survey responses of 399 software project managers suggest that the relationships among these variables are more complex than what has been perceived by the literature. The results suggest a tradeoff relationship between response extensiveness and response efficiency. These two agility dimensions impact software development performance differently: response efficiency positively affects all of on-time completion, on-budget completion, and software functionality, whereas response extensiveness positively affects only software functionality. The results also suggest that team autonomy has a positive effect on response efficiency and a negative effect on response extensiveness, and that team diversity has a positive effect on response extensiveness. We conducted 10 post hoc case studies to qualitatively cross-validate our PLS results and provide rich, additional insights regarding the complex, dynamic interplays between autonomy, diversity, agility, and performance. The qualitative analysis also provides explanations for both supported and unsupported hypotheses. We discuss these qualitative analysis results and conclude with the theoretical and practical implications of our research findings for agile development approaches.

Impact of Budget and Schedule Pressure on Software Development Cycle Time and Effort

As excessive budget and schedule compression becomes the norm in today's software industry, an understanding of its impact on software development performance is crucial for effective management strategies. Previous software engineering research has implied a nonlinear impact of schedule pressure on software development outcomes. Borrowing insights from organizational studies, we formalize the effects of budget and schedule pressure on software cycle time and effort as U-shaped functions. The research models were empirically tested with data from a 25 billion/year international technology firm, where estimation bias is consciously minimized and potential confounding variables are properly tracked. We found that controlling for software process, size, complexity, and conformance quality, budget pressure, a less researched construct, has significant U-shaped relationships with development cycle time and development effort. On the other hand, contrary to our prediction, schedule pressure did not display significant nonlinear impact on development outcomes. A further exploration of the sampled projects revealed that the involvement of clients in the software development might have ldquoerodedrdquo the potential benefits of schedule pressure. This study indicates the importance of budget pressure in software development. Meanwhile, it implies that achieving the potential positive effect of schedule pressure requires cooperation between clients and software development teams.

Work dispersion, process-based learning, and offshore software development performance

In this paper we develop a learning-mediated model of offshore software project productivity and quality to examine whether widely adopted structured software processes are effective in mitigating the negative effects of work dispersion in offshore software development. We explicate how the key process areas of the capability maturity model (CMM) can be utilized as a platform to launch learning routines in offshore software development and thereby explain why some offshore software development process improvement initiatives are more effective than others. We validate our learning-mediated model of offshore software project performance by utilizing data collected from 42 offshore software projects of a large firm that operates at the CMM level-5 process maturity. Our results indicate that investments in structured processes mitigate the negative effects of work dispersion in offshore software development. We also find that the effect of software process improvement initiatives is mediated through investments in process-based learning activities. These results imply that investments in structured processes and the corresponding process-based learning activities can be an economically viable way to counter the challenges of work dispersion and improve offshore project performance. We discuss the implication of these results for the adoption of normative process models by offshore software firms.

Impact of classes of development coordination tools on software development performance

Although a diverse variety of software development coordination tools are widely used in practice, considerable debate surrounds their impact on software development performance. No large-scale field research has systematically examined their impact on software development performance. This paper reports the results of a multinational field study of software projects in 209 software development organizations to empirically examine the influence of six key classes of development coordination tools on the efficiency (reduction of development rework, budget compliance) and effectiveness (defect reduction) of software development performance. Based on an in-depth field study, the article conceptualizes six holistic classes of development coordination tools. The results provide nuanced insights—some counter to prevailing beliefs—into the relationships between the use of various classes of development coordination tools and software development performance. The overarching finding is that the performance benefits of development coordination tools are contingent on the salient types of novelty in a project. The dimension of development performance—efficiency or effectiveness—that each class of tools is associated with varies systematically with whether a project involves conceptual novelty, process novelty, multidimensional novelty (both process and conceptual novelty), or neither. Another noteworthy insight is that the use of some classes of tools introduces an efficiency-effectiveness tradeoff. Collectively, the findings are among the first to offer empirical support for the varied performance impacts of various classes of development coordination tools and have important implications for software development practice. The paper also identifies several promising areas for future research.

Work Dispersion, Process-Based Learning, and Offshore Software Development Performance

Work Dispersion, Process-Based Learning, and Offshore Software Development Performance

A system‐on‐a‐chip for real‐time software digital media processing

AbstractIn this paper the authors propose a new system‐on‐a‐chip architecture for image processing that achieves both good processing performance and ease of software development. The architecture consists of three types of programmable processors running in parallel: a RISC CPU for bit string processing, a VLIW CPU for two‐dimensional pixel array processing, and a data transfer processor. The data transfer processor provides a function for transferring small regions in the two‐dimensional pixel array for which addresses change discretely to a data cache while converting them to continuous address data. As a result, the data cache hit rate with respect to the accesses to the small screen regions, which is used frequently in image processing, is greatly improved from around 75% to almost 100%. The authors implemented their architecture in an LSI and ran a performance evaluation using digital television decoder software and an optimized C compiler. The results confirmed that processing performance increased threefold with a 22% rise in the packaging die area. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 89(8): 51–59, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.20288

Distributed team performance in software development

International collaboration gives students the opportunity to use different technologies for collaboration across time and distance as well as problem-solving experience with different cultures in a team-based environment. Results indicate that not only is communication crucial to a team's success but the process and timing of specific actions can have an impact on a team's software development performance.

Parallel Finite Element Software Development and Performance Analysis in an Object-Oriented Programming Framework

The use of object-oriented programming techniques in the development of parallel, finite element analysis software enhances code reuse and increases efficiency during application development. In this paper, an object-oriented programming framework developed by the authors is utilized in the implementation of parallel finite element software for modeling of the resin transfer molding manufacturing process. The motivation for choosing the resin transfer molding finite element application and implementing it with the object-oriented framework is that it was originally developed and parallelized in a functional programming paradigm thus offering the possibility of direct comparisons. Discussion of the software development effort and performance results are presented and analyzed.

Are Individual Differences in Software Development Performance Possible to Capture Using a Quantitative Survey?

Software engineering is human intensive. Thus, it is important to understand and evaluate the value of different types of experiences, and their relation to the quality of the developed software. Many job advertisements focus on requiring knowledge of, for example, specific programming languages. This may seem sensible at first sight, but is it really possible to capture software development performance using this kind of simple measure? On the other hand, maybe it is sufficient to have general knowledge in programming and then it is enough to learn a specific language within the new job. Two key questions are (1) whether prior knowledge of a specific language actually does improve software quality and (2) whether it is possible to capture performance using simple quantitative measures? This paper presents an empirical study where the experience, for example with respect to a specific programming language, of students is assessed using a quantitative survey at the beginning of a course on the personal software process (PSP), and the outcome of the course is evaluated, for example, using the number of defects and development time. Statistical tests are used to analyze the relationship between experience/background and the performance of the students in terms of software quality. The results are mostly unexpected, for example, we are unable to show any significant relation between experience in the programming language used and the number of defects detected.

An empirical study of the effect of knowledge integration on software development performance

Although the role of integrating application domain knowledge with technical knowledge is implicitly recognized in software engineering practice, no large scale study has attempted to validate this empirically in a field setting. In this paper, a large-scale empirical study of 232 software development projects in 232 software development organizations shows that higher integration of business application domain knowledge with technical knowledge during the software development process increases software development effectiveness, reduces defect density throughout the development trajectory, lowers warranty defects, and increases software development efficiency. The findings highlight the influence of knowledge integration on various dimensions of software development performance.

Software development worldwide: The state of the practice

A survey of 104 projects in India, Japan, Europe, and the US is yielding quantitative data about these countries' software development practices and performance, adoption of competing development models, and the practices' impact on performance. The findings are particularly relevant to firms that are considering the potential advantages or a greater use of outsourcing.

Software process improvement strategy for enterprise information systems development

In an era of rapid information exchange, the use of computers apparently becomes a necessity both at work in order to get the jobs done and at home for leisure and entertainment purposes. To support the pace of massive computerisation, the need for on-time, cost effective and high quality software is ever increasing. With the turn of the century, software re-engineering exercises are being actively pursued in enterprises of all magnitudes worldwide. The software process improvement (SPI) program is among one of the contemporary approaches commonly adopted for rationalising the capability and performance of software development and maintenance in an enterprise. This paper explains the basic principles behind SPI and outlines the features and characteristics of some of the SPI models commonly used in the industry. The functional, organisational and resources implications of implementing the models are discussed. A real-life case study is given to illustrate how an SPI program was put into practice in a medium-sized enterprise whose business well-being was underpinned by the quality, punctuality and cost effectiveness of its systems development activities.

Interaction factors in software development performance in distributed student teams in computer science

This research in progress paper compares the characteristics of high and low performance distributed student teams doing software development in Computer Science. The distributed student teams were involved in a software development project that was part of a Computer Science course at two universities located in different countries.We developed a set of categories to examine the email communication of distributed student teams. This paper tracks the progression and changes in the categories coded for each team's communication throughout the project's timeline, particularly during key decision periods in the software development cycle.

Effects of intra‐group conflict on packaged software development team performance

Abstract. Data from 40 packaged software development teams are used to test a path model that relates three antecedents, the presence of intragroup conflict and the level of conflict management to software development team performance. Findings indicate that a combination of the team's characteristics, team member characteristics and existing levels of intragroup conflict accounts for nearly one‐half of the variance between the best and worst‐performing teams. Furthermore, the level of conflict management moderates the relationship between existing levels of intragroup conflict and performance. These results highlight both the complexity of the social processes of packaged software development and the value of this perspective for gaining insight on software development performance.

Education of wireless and ATM networking concepts using hands-on laboratory experience

Traditional computer networking courses primarily tend to provide students with hands-on software development and network performance experience with TCP/IP and Ethernet networks. Our objectives are to enhance the curriculum of networking courses and the expertise of students by introducing next-generation networks such as wireless and ATM networks. To facilitate this, we have established a wireless ATM network instructional facility (NIF) at Washington State University (WSU). Projects based on ATM networks and wireless networks have been introduced in a course on undergraduate computer networks taught at WSU during Spring 1998. This paper describes the laboratory setup, the projects and assignments, and the feedback obtained from the students.

A contingency examination of CASE-task fit on software developer's performance

This study examines the CASE-performance relationship, contingent on the task characteristics of software developers. Contingency theory is used here as a framework to explore the CASE-task interactions that may have been important in motivating the performance of IS professionals. The results indicate that CASE-task fit contributes significantly to the performance of software developers. Implications of the findings, from both a research and a managerial perspective, are discussed in the paper.

Recycling software - on the road to high performance in software companies

The present paper demonstrates that within the software industry high performance organisations emerge when software companies exploit the equivocality of the information technology as well as their interpretive capabilities in order to recycle software. The point of departure for the paper is the observation that, for many years, reuse of software objects, etc. has attracted much interest and energy from researchers, engineers and managers within the software industry, primarily because they perceive such reuse as the key to high performance in software development. Ultimately, this idea focuses on creation of software factories, which will improve efficiency in software development and provide managers with more control over the software development process. However, truly successful implementation of the idea has never happened, most likely because its champions solely emphasise technical aspects of the process. We already know that the equivocality of the information technology implies that it can take on many different forms and holds an infinite number of possible and plausible applications. Besides, based on a longitudinal study of software development and new business creation in a rapidly growing software company, this paper shows that rather than focusing on reuse of software objects, software companies must give attention to the possibilities for recycling of software provided by the equivocality of the information technology, if they want to improve performance. Yet, recycling of software is not an easy task, as besides being a matter of mastering technological knowledge, it demands that software companies undertake continuous sense making of the software and, thereby, convince their customers about its usefulness as solutions to their specific needs. When successful then, this process implies that over time software platforms are used for provision of solutions to a variety of needs. To illustrate this idea, the paper traces two software platforms on tour, and it analyses the formulation of new interpretations which facilitate their recycling.